
Class _Ti4-^- 
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CopyrightN^ jCj ij 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



AN INTRODUCTION 



TO THE STUDY OF 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



BY 

BRANDER MATTHEWS, D.CL. 

PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



REVISED 



AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI CHICAGO 

BOSTON ATLANTA 







\ 



Copyright, 1896, 1911, 1918, by 
AMERICAN BOOK COMPANYc 



INT. TO AM. LIT. 
w. p. 34 



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9E0 mg iFtientJ anti Colleague 
NICHOLAS MUREAY BUTLER 



PREFATORY NOTE 

This book is intended as an introduction to the study 
of American literature. Although the chapters on the 
separate authors are wholly distinct, they have been so 
planned that each of them prepares the way for its suc- 
cessor, and that all of them together outline the changing 
circumstances under which American literature has devel- 
oped. An attempt has been made to show how each of 
the chief American authors influenced his time, and how 
he in turn was influenced by it ; and also to indicate how 
each of them was related to the others, both personally 
and artistically. 

Bearing in mind the fact that the student needs to have 
his attention centered on vital points, all dates and all 
proper names, and all titles of books not absolutely essen- 
tial, have been rigorously omitted. Interest has thus been 
concentrated on the literary career of each of the greater 
writers and on their practice of the literary art, in the hope 
and expectation that the student will be encouraged and 
stimulated to read their works for his own pleasure. 
After the consideration of these more important authors, 
one by one, the writers of less consequence have been 
discussed briefly in a single chapter ; and in like manner 
a single chapter has been devoted to a summary considera- 
tion of the condition of our literature at the beginning of the 
twentieth century. No living author is named in the text. 

5 



6 PREFATORY NOTE 

To arouse the student's interest in the authors as actual 
men, the illustrations chosen have been confined to por- 
traits and views, and to facsimiles of manuscripts. To 
enable him to see for himself the successive stages of 
the growth of American literature, and to let him dis- 
cover how the authors sometimes came one after an- 
other and sometimes worked side by side, there has been 
appended also a chronological table of the chief dates 
in our literary history. 

As mere text-book instruction can never be an adequate 
substitute for the student's own acquaintance with the 
actual works of the authors discussed, there have been 
annexed to every chapter bibliographical notes calling 
attention to the editions most suitable for the student's 
reading, and also to the best biographies and to a few of 
the most suggestive criticisms. 

The thanks of the author and of the publishers are 
due to Miss Alice M. Longfellow, Professor Norton, Mr. 
H. G. O. Blake, Mr. Edward W. Emerson, Mr. Walter R. 
Benjamin, and Gen. J. G. Wilson, for kindly furnishing 
the original manuscripts herewith reproduced ; to Mr. F. 
D. Stone, for aid in making a facsimile of Franklin's 
*' Almanac"; and to Dr. Chas. H. J. Douglas of the 
Brooklyn Boys' High School, for preparing the most of 
the questions appended to every chapter — questions in- 
tended to be suggestive only and by no means exhaustive. 

B. M. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prefatory Note 5 

I Introduction 9 

II The Colonial Period 15 

III Benjamin Franklin 21 

IV Washington Irving . . . . . . .40 

V James Fenimore Cooper 56 

VI William Cullen Bryant 69 

Vll Edgar Allan Poe 81 

VIII Ralph Waldo Emerson 96 

IX Nathaniel Hawthorne 113 

X Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . , .127 

XI John Greenleaf Whittier . . . .141 

XII Oliver Wendell Holmes 158 

XIII David Henry Thoreau 171 

XIV James Russell Lowell 178 

XV^ Francis Parkman 194 

XVI Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln . . 204 

XVII ^mMark Twain' (Samuel L. Clemens) . . .215 

XVIII Eugene Field and James Whitcomb Riley . . 227 

XIX Other Writers 238 

XX The Beginning of the Twentieth Century . . 246 
Chronological Table o 252 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

The Colonial Period 

Portrait of Cotton Mather ... i8 

Portrait of Jonathan Edwards . . 19 

Benjamin Franklin 

Portrait 21 

Birthplace 23 

Facsimiles of ** Almanack " . . 26,27 
Facsimile Manuscript . . . . 34, 35 

Washington Irving 

Portrait 40 

Facsimile Manuscript . , . . 46, 47 

Sunnyside . • 53 

James Fenimore Cooper 

Portrait 56 

Otsego Hall 57 

Facsimile Manuscript 61 

William Cullen Bryant 

Portrait 69 

Facsimile Manuscript 73 

Residence, Roslyn, L.I 78 

Edgar Allan Poe 

Portrait 81 

Facsimile Manuscript .... 88, 89 

Cottage, Fordham, N.Y 93 

Ralph ^VALDO Emerson 

Portrait 96 

Residence, Concord, Mass. . . . 100 

Facsimile Manuscript . . . 104, 105 

Nathaniel Hawthorne 

Portrait 113 

Birthplace 114 

The Old Manse 117 

Facsimile Manuscript 121 

The Wayside 123 

Henry Wads.vorth Longfellow 

Portrait 127 

Birthplace 128 

Residence, Cambridge, Mass. . . 130 

Facsimile Manuscript 136 

John Greenleaf Whittier 

Portrait 141 

Birthplace 142 

Residence, Amesbury, Mass. . . 148 

Facsimile Manuscript 152 



page 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Portrait 158 

Birthplace 160 

Summer Residence, Beverly Farms, 

Mass 165 

Facsimile Manuscript 168 

Henry David Thoreau 

Portrait 171 

Hut on Walden Pond 172 

Facsimile Manuscript 176 

James Russell Lowell 

Portrait 178 

Elmwood, Cambridge, Mass. . . . 182 

Facsimile Manuscript 191 

Francis Parkman 

Portrait 194 

Residence, Boston, Mass 198 

Facsimile Manuscript 201- 

Daniel Webster and Abraham 

Lincoln 
Portraits of : 

Thomas Jefferson 205 

Alexander Hamilton 206 

Daniel Webster 207 

Abraham Lincoln 21 1 

Facsimile Lincoln Manuscript . . 213 

** Mark Twain " 

Portrait 215 

Facsimile Manuscript 221 

Residence 223 

Eugene Field and James Whitcomb 
Riley 
Portraits of : 

Joel Chandler Harris 229 

"Bret Harte 229 

Eugene Field 230 

James Whitcomb Riley 233 

Other Writers 
Portraits of: 

George Bancroft 238 

William H. Prescott 239 

Bayard Taylor 241 

Edmund C. Stedman 242 

Walt Whitman 242 

Harriet Beecher Stowe 244 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



I INTRODUCTION 

Since the invention of the art of writing, the story of 
the past is no longer kept alive by word of mouth only, 
the father telling the son, and the son, in turn, telling the 
grandson. It has been set down in black and white, by 
means of letters, so that we to-day can read the record of 
the feelings, the thoughts, and the acts of the people of 
two thousand years ago. And we, in our turn, are setting 
down our sayings and our doings, so that those who come 
after us will be able to understand what we felt, what we 
thought, and what we did. When this record is so skill- 
fully made as to give pleasure to the reader, it is called 
literature. 

Literature, then, is the reflection and the reproduction 
of the life of the people. It has existed ever since the 
invention of the art of writing, which enabled men to keep 
an account of the things they wished to remember. The 
literature of the past helps us to understand the U\ts of 
the peoples of the past. Greek literature tells us how the 
Greeks lived, and how they felt, what they thought, and 
what they did. Through Latin literature we get to know 
the ways of the old Romans ; and, through Hebrew litera- 

9 



lO AMERICAN LITERATURE 

ture, we are enabled to understand the character of the 
Jewish race. 

In like manner, English literature tells us about the life 
of the peoples who speak the English language. English 
literature is the record of the thoughts and the feelings 
and the acts of the great English-speaking race. This 
record extends a long way back into the past ; but it is 
also being made to-day and every day ; and it bids fair to 
be made for many centuries to come. Greek literature is 
dead, and Hebrew literature is dead ; but English literature 
is alive now. It is the continuous account of the life of 
those who speak the English language, in the past, in the 
present, and in the future. Here in the United States, 
above the Great Lakes in Canada, across the Atlantic in 
Great Britain, afar on the other side of the Pacific in Aus- 
tralia and in India, there are now men and women keeping 
the record of their feelings, their thoughts, and their acts. 

All that these men and these women write, if only it be 
so skillfully presented as to give pleasure to the reader, 
becomes at once a part of English literature. It is no 
matter where the authors live, whether in New York or in 
Montreal, in London, in Melbourne or in Calcutta, what 
they write in the English language belongs to English 
literature. It is no matter what the nationality of the 
author may be, whether he is a citizen of the United States 
or a subject of the British crown ; if he uses the English 
language he contributes to English literature. This must 
be remembered always — that the record of the life of the 
peoples using the English language is English literature. 

As literature is a reflection and a reproduction of the life 
of the peoples speaking the language in which it is written, 
this literature is likely to be strong and great in propor- 
tion as the peoples who speak the language are strong and 



INTRODUCTION II 

great. English literature is therefore likely to grow, as it 
is the record of the life of the English-speaking race, and 
as this race is steadily spreading abroad over the globe. 

It has been estimated that in the time of Chaucer less 
than three milHons of men and women spoke Enghsh, and 
in the time of Shakspere less than seven millions ; and 
all these lived in the British Isles. But after a while the 
British Isles became too small for those who spoke Eng- 
lish. Men and women went east and west out of England, 
and settled in the four quarters of the earth. They grew 
in numbers rapidly. 

Another estimate shows that at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century probably about twenty millions of men 
and women spoke English, while about thirty-one millions 
spoke French, and about thirty millions spoke German. 
Now, at the end of the second decade of the twentieth 
century, it is believed that about fifty millions speak 
French, and nearly one hundred millions speak German, 
while nearly two hundred millions speak English. Our 
language is spreading far more rapidly than any other; 
and the prophecy has been made that at the end of the 
twentieth century the number of those who use the Enghsh 
language will be more than five hundred millions. 

While those who speak German are still mostly in Ger- 
many, and those who speak French mostly in France, the 
most of those who speak English are no longer in England, 
for the total population of all the British Isles is now less 
than fifty millions. The largest single body of the Eng- 
lish-speaking race has not even a political connection with 
England, for English is the language of the population 
of the United States, who now number more than one 
hundred millions. As the people of the United States 
are in no wise inferior to the people of Great Britain, it 



12 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

seems likely that hereafter the Americans, rather than 
the British, will be recognized as the chief of the English- 
speaking peoples. 

So long as the English-speaking race dwelt only in the 
British Isles, English literature had to do only with British 
subjects. Now that the English-speaking race has settled 
itself also in America, and now more especially that the 
chief body of this race is not to be found in the British 
Isles but in the United States, it is needful to have terms 
to distinguish that portion of English literature which is 
written in the British Isles from that which is written 
in the United States. 

Until the Declaration of Independence, the unity of the 
English race was unbroken ; and until the end of the 
eighteenth century the stream of English literature had 
but a single channel. Since we in the United States began 
to have writers of our own, the record of our feelings, of 
our thoughts, and of our deeds may fairly be called Ameri- 
can literature. It is still a part of English literature, for 
it is written in the English language. As Canada and as 
Australia are growing and prospering, there can be said 
to be already a Canadian literature and an Australian 
literature. And to distinguish the literature of the Eng- 
lish-speaking race who continue to live in the British Isles 
from the literature of the Americans and the Canadians 
and the Australians, perhaps that had best be called 
British literature. 

So, in the second decade of the twentieth century, we 
note that English literature, one in the past, has four divi- 
sions, — British, American, Canadian, and Australian. Of 
these, the British is still the most important, having the 
most great authors. But the American is second, and is 
growing sturdily and steadily. The English literature of 



INTRODUCTION 1 3 

the past is as much our glorious heritage as it is that of 
the British. It belongs to us as it belongs to them, and 
we have an equal pride in this splendid possession. 

But as an American of to-day is unlike an Englishman 
in many points of custom and of taste, so American litera- 
ture has begun to differ from British literature in many 
ways. Literature is a reflection and a reproduction of life, 
and as life in the United States is more and more unlike 
life in Great Britain, American literature must needs 
become more and more unlike British literature. We 
Americans, for the most part, come of the same stock as 
the British of to-day, but we have lived, for many genera- 
tions, in another land, with another climate and under 
another social organization. 

For more than a century now, the American has grown 
up in a republic free from feudal influences, without caste 
and class distinctions, with public schools open to rich and 
poor alike. All these things cannot but have had their 
effect upon us. We believe that there is a difference be- 
tween the American and the Englishman — although it is 
not easy to declare precisely what that difference may be. 
We beUeve that there is such a thing as Americanism ; 
and that there have been Americans of a type impossible 
elsewhere in the world. Washington and Franklin were 
typical Americans, different as they were ; and so were 
Emerson and Lincoln, Farragut and Lowell. It was 
Lowell who found in President Hayes '' that excellent new 
thing we call Americanism, which I suppose is that dignity 
of human nature . . . which consists, perhaps, in not 
thinking yourself either better or worse than your neigh- 
bors by reason of any artificial distinction." This Ameri- 
canism has left its mark on the writings of the authors of 
the United States. 



14 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

It is perhaps for this reason, and perhaps, also, because 
we all like to find ourselves in the books we read, that 
American writers are of more interest to us here in the 
United States than are the recent writers of the other 
great branch of English literature, the writers now living 
in the British Isles. British literature reproduces for 
us a life which is at once like ours, and unlike it. Amer- 
ican literature reproduces for us our own life ; it records 
our feelings, our thoughts, and our deeds ; it enables us 
to see ourselves and our neighbors as we really are, or 
at least as we seem to ourselves to be ; it explains us to 
ourselves. And therefore, even if American literature, 
which began only at the end of the eighteenth century, 
were inferior in quality as well as in quantity to the 
British literature of the twentieth century, yet it would 
be of more importance to us here in America. To learn 
how it came into being and who its founders were ought 
to be interesting to all of us. 

Questions. — What is literature ? Mention several historical divi- 
sions of the subject. 

Trace the spread of the EngUsh-speaking race, from the time of 
Chaucer to the present day. 

How has English Uterature come to have four geographical divisions.'* 

What is meant by British literature ? 

What is the distinguishing characteristic of American literature ? 

Note. — The "Cambridge History of American Literature," in three volumes, 
which contains critical biographies by various writers and also full bibliogi-aphies, 
is useful for reference. (Putnam,) Also to be recommended are Whitcomb's 
"Chronological Outline of American Literature" (Macmillan ; Stedman's " An 
American Anthology " (Houghton Mifflin) ; and Carpenter's '* American Prose," 
(Macmillan). 



II THE COLONIAL PERIOD 

The English settlements in North America began at 
a time when English literature had just reached its most 
glorious period. Shakspere was writing his plays when 
Captain John Smith first explored Chesapeake Bay. Milton 
was born the year before Henry Hudson first sailed up the 
noble river that now bears his name. Bacon published his 
great book on philosophical and scientific method only a 
few months before the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth 
Rock. 

The men who left England for conscience' sake were 
many of them scholars with a lov^e for learning. But in 
this fierce new land in which they sought to establish 
themselves, they had no time, at first, to do anything more 
than defend their lives, build their houses, plant their 
fields, and set up their churches and their schools. They 
were strong men, laboring mightily, and laying the broad 
foundations of the republic we live under to-day. 

What they wrote then had always an immediate object. 
They set down in black and white thjir compacts, their 
laws, and their own important doings. They described the 
condition of affairs in the colonies to the kinsfolk and the 
friends they had left behind in the mother country. They 
prepared elaborate treatises in which they set forth their 
own vigorous ideas about religion. For singing songs or for 
telling tales, they had neither leisure nor taste ; so we find 
no early American novelist and no early American poet. 

15 



l6 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Perhaps the beginnings of American literature are to 
be sought in the books written by the first adventurers 
for the purpose of giving an account of the strange coun- 
tries in which they had traveled. Of these adventurers, 
the most interesting was Captain John Smith. He was 
born in England in 1579. As a lad, he ran away to 
become a soldier, and saw much fighting against the 
Turks. Taken prisoner, he was sold for a slave, but 
made his escape and went back to England. 

In 1607 he was one of those who came over here to 
found a colony in Virginia. He himself records his being 
made captive by the Indians, and the saving of his life by 
Pocahontas, the daughter of the Indian chief, Powhatan. 
For more than ten years Smith kept coming to America, 
and exploring the bays and rivers of the coast from Vir- 
ginia to New England. He published, in 1608, '' A True 
Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as 
hath Happened in Virginia/' the very first book about any 
of the English settlements in North America. In 1624 
he was one of the authors of '' The General History of 
Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles." The last 
years of his life were spent in England, and he died in 
London in 1632. 

John Smith was the most picturesque figure in the early 
history of America; and his writings are like him — bold, 
free, highly colored. He was more picturesque than any 
of the solid scholars and the stalwart ministers of New 
England whom we find uniting in the making of what is 
now known as the ''Bay Psalm Book." This was the first 
English book printed in America. It was published in 
1640. Its full title was '' The Whole Book of Psalms faith- 
fully Translated into English Metre." The worthy divines 
who prepared this volume were not born poets ; their 



THE COLONIAL PERIOD 1/ 

verses are halting and their rimes are strained. As it 
has been said, these hymns " seem to have been ham- 
mered out on an anvil, by blows from a blacksmith's sledge." 
Ten years later another volume of American verse was 
published, not in Massachusetts but in London. It was 
called '' The Tenth Muse lately Sprung up in America," 
and it contained poems by Mistress Anne Bradstreet. 
They were written in the conventional and exaggerated 
manner then in vogue in England, and they reveal on her 
part no real observation of the new country in which she 
lived. She seems not to have seen the wide difference 
between the skies and the trees and the flowers and the 
birds of New England and those of the old England she 
had left as a bride. She was born in 1613 and she died in 
1672. Among her descendants, alive two hundred years 
after her own death, were R. H. Dana, the author of '* Two 
"Years before the Mast," and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the 
author of the ''Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." 

. After Mistress Bradstreet the New England writers next 
to be picked out for mention here are the Mathers. There 
were many of them, and most of them wrote abundantly. 
The more noteworthy were Increase Mather, born in 1639 
and dying in 1723, and his son, Cotton Mather, born in 
1663 ^^^ flying i^ 1728. The son wrote unceasingly and 
he was well equipped for authorship by deep learning. His 
own library was by far the largest of any then in private 
hands in America. It was said that '' no native of his coun- 
try had read so much and retained more of what he read." 
Yet he was vain personally and his judgment w^as capri 
cious. He was one of the most active in the persecution 
of the alleged witches of Salem in 1692. Three years 
before the trials of these unfortunate creatures he had 
published a volume on '* Memorable Providences relatmg 



i8 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



to Witchcrafts." Later in life he wrote his most useful 
book, ''Essays to do Good," published in 1710. This was 
the volume which fell into Franklin's hands when he was 
a boy and gave him such a turn of thinking as had an 
abiding influence on his conduct through life. 

The most of the writing 
done in New England in the 
seventeenth century had to 
do with religion, and so it 
was also in the early part of 
the eighteenth century. It 
was only as the Revolution 
began to loom up on the 
horizon that the interests of 
the church became less excit- 
ing than the interests of the. 
state, and politics succeeded 
religion as the chief topic of 
the publications of the day. 
The growth of the colonies in population and in resources 
was to give them the strength finally to break the bonds 
which united them to the British crown. Schools and col- 
leges were established and newspapers were started, until 
at last there was no one of the little cities along the coast 
that had not its printing press. A spirit of independence 
was beginning to develop. In the early years of the 
eighteenth century there were Americans who thought for 
themselves and who wrote out boldly what they thought. 

It was at the very beginning of the eighteenth century 
that the two men were born who are beyond all question 
the two greatest American authors coming to maturity 
before the revolution. These two men were Jonathan 
Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. They were products of 




Cotton Mather 



THE COLONIAL PERIOD 



19 



the American soil and they grew up under American con- 
ditions. They were the first native Americans able to 
make a reputation on the other side of the Atlantic and to 
hold their own in debate with the best men of Europe. 
Of the two, Edwards was three years the older, and for 
that reason he may be considered here before Franklin. 
It is not to be questioned that Franklin is the more 
important of the two because of his services to the coun- 
try as a whole and because he has left us one book, at 
least, which is still read, his delightful ''Autobiography." 

Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703 in Connecticut. 
When only twelve years old he entered Yale College, 
being graduated before he was seventeen. He studied 
for the ministry and was ordained. 
While a student at Yale, and after- 
ward when a tutor in the college, 
he paid attention to natural science, 
having the same wholesome curiosity 
that characterized Franklin. He even 
planned a book on this subject, and 
gathered many notes, the result of 
his own observations and experiments. 
He studied electricity, having ideas 
about it long in advance of his time, 
and almost anticipating Franklin's 
discoveries. He also turned his acute and searching mind 
towards astronomy. But theology was at all times his 
chief study, and it is by his writings on religious subjects 
that he made bis mark in the world. 

He was settled as minister of a parish at the age oi 
twenty-four, being then married. He brought up his 
family amid many privations. His health was poor but 
his spirit was always strong. He spent thirteen hours a 




Jonathan Edwards 



20 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

day in his study. Even when he rode or walked he kept 
on thinking; and when from home he had a habit of 
pinning bits of paper to his clothes, one for every thought 
he wished to write down on his return, and he would 
sometimes get back with so many of these scraps that 
they fluttered all about him. 

His great work on the '' Freedom of the Will " was 
published in 1754. It is now but little read, for we no 
longer see the subject from Edwards's point of view. 
But it remains a monument of intellectual effort. To this 
day it is probably the most direct and subtle treatise on 
a philosophical theme written by any American. It justi- 
fies the assertion of more than one European critic that 
no work of the eighteenth century surpasses it in the 
vigor of its logic or in the sharpness of its argument. 
Jonathan Edwards died in 1758, a few days after he had 
been made president of Princeton College. 

Questions. — What kind of men were the earliest English settlers 
in America ? What did they put down in writing ? 

Give some account of the most interesting writer among the early 
adventurers to America. 

Describe two examples of early colonial verse — one religious, the 
ether secular. 

What was Cotton Mather^s connection with the Salem witchcraft 
trials ? 

What changes took place in the general spirit of American literature 
about the middle of the eighteenth century? 

Give an account of the first native American wTiter who made a 
reputation in Europe. 

Note. — There are brief biographies of Capt. John Smith by C. D. Warner 
(Hoh) ; of Jonathan Edwards by A. V. G. Allen (Houghton ISiifflin) ; and' of 
Cotton Mather by Barrett Wendell (Dodd, Mead). See also M. C. Tyler's 
" History of American Literature " 1606-1783 (Putnam, 2 vols.), and the chapters on 
our colonial writers in vol. i of the " Cambridge History of American Literature " 
(Putnam) . 




Ill BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Queen 
Anne sat on the throne of Great Britain, there were ten 
British colonies strung along the Atlantic coast of North 
America. These colonies were various in origin and ill- 
disposed one to another. They were young, feeble, and 
jealous ; their total population was less than four hundred 
thousand. In the colony of Massachusetts, and in the 
town of Boston, on January 17, 1706, was born Benjamin 
Franklin, who died in the state of Pennsylvania, and in 
the city of Philadelphia, on April 17, 1790. 

21 



22 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In the eighty-four years of his life, Benjamin Frankhn 
saw the ten colonies increase to thirteen ; he saw them 
come together for defense against the common enemy ; 
he saw them throw off their allegiance to the British 
crown ; he saw them form themselves into these United 
States ; he saw the population increase to nearly four mil- 
lions ; he saw the beginning of the movement across the 
Alleghanies which was to give us the boundless West and 
all our possibilities of expansion. And in the bringing 
about of this growth, this union, this independence, this 
development, the share of Benjamin Franklin was greater 
than the share of any other man. 

With Washington, Franklin divided the honor of being 
the American who had most fame abroad and most venera- 
tion at home. He was the only man (so one of his biogra- 
phers reminds us) who signed the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of 
Peace with England, and the Constitution under which we 
still live. But not only had he helped to make the nation 
— he had done more than any one else to form the indi- 
vidual. If the typical American is shrewd, industrious, 
and thrifty, it is due in a measure to the counsel and to 
the example of Benjamin Franklin. In ** Poor Richard's 
Almanack" he summed up wisely, and he set forth sharply, 
the rules of conduct on which Americans have trained 
themselves now for a century and a half. Upon his coun- 
trymen the influence of Franklin's preaching and of his 
practice was wide, deep, and abiding. He was the first 
great American — for Washington was twenty-six years 
younger. 

Benjamin was the youngest son of Josiah Franklin, who 
had come to America in 1682. His mother was a daugh- 
ter of Peter Folger, one of the earliest colonists. His 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 



23 



father was a soap-boiler and tallow-chandler ; and as a boy 
of ten Benjamin was employed in cutting wick for the 
candles, filling the dipping molds, tending shop, and going 
on errands. He did not like the trade, and wanted to be a 
sailor. So his father used to take him to walk about 
Boston among the joiners, bricklayers, turners, and other 
mechanics, that the 
boy might discover 
his inclination for 
some trade on land. 

Franklin tells us 
that from a child he 
was fond of reading, 
and laid out on books 
all the little money 
that came into his 
hands. Among the 
books he read as a 
boy were the " Pil- 
grim's Progress" and 
Mather's ''Essays to 
do Good " ; the lat- 
ter gave him such a 
turn of thinking that it influenced his conduct through life 
and made him always ''set a greater value on the character 
of a doer of good than on any other kind of reputation." 

It was this bookish inclination which determined his 
father to make a printer of him, and at the age of twelve 
he was apprenticed to his brother James. There was then 
but one newspaper in America — the Bost07i News-Letter^ 
issued once a week. A second journal, the Boston Gazette^ 
was started in 1719. At first James Franklin was its 
printer, but when it passed into other hands he began a 




Franklin's Birthplace 



24 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

paper of his own — the New England Courant, more h'vely 
than the earlier journals, and more enterprising. As Ben- 
jamin set up the type for his brother's paper, it struck him 
that perhaps he could write as well as some of the contrib- 
utors. He was then a boy of sixteen, and already had he 
been training himself as a writer. He had studied Locke 
"On the Human Understanding," Xenophon's '* Memora- 
bilia [Memorable Things] of Socrates," and a volume of the 
"Spectator" of Addison and Steele. This last he chose 
as his model, mastering its methods, taking apart the 
essays to see how they were put together, and so finding 
out the secret of its simple style, its easy wit, its homely 
humor. His first attempts at composition were put in at 
night under the door of the printing house ; they were 
approved and printed ; and after a while he declared their 
authorship. 

For a mild joke on the government James Franklin was 
forbidden to publish the New England Conrant^ so he can- 
celed his brother's apprenticeship and made over the paper 
to Benjamin. But the indentures were secretly renewed ; 
and the elder brother treated the younger with increasing 
harshness, giving him an aversion to arbitrary power which 
stuck to him through life. 

At length the boy could bear it no longer, and he left 
his brother's shop. James was able to prevent him from 
getting work elsewhere in Boston, so Benjamin slipped off 
on a sloop to New York. Failing of employment there, 
he went on to Philadelphia, being then seventeen. He 
arrived there with only a "Dutch dollar" in his pocket. 
Weary and hungry, he asked at a baker's for a three- 
penny-worth of bread, and, to his surprise, he received 
three great puffy rolls. He walked off with a roll under 
each arm and eating the third ; and he passed the house of 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 2$ 

a Mr. Read, whose daughter stood at the door, thinking 
the young stranger made a most awkward, ridiculous 
appearance, and little surmising that she was one day to 
be his wife. 

Franklin worked at his trade in Philadelphia for nearly 
two years. In 1724 he crossed the ocean for the first time 
to buy type and a press but was disappointed of a letter 
of credit Governor Keith had promised him. He found 
employment as a printer in London, and he came near 
starting a swimming school; but in 1726, after two years* 
absence, he returned to Philadelphia, and there he made 
his home for the rest of his life. He soon set up for him- 
self as a printer; and, as he was more skillful than his rivals 
and more industrious, he prospered, getting the govern- 
ment printing and buying the Pennsylvania Gazette. 

He married Deborah Read ; and he made many friends, 
the closest of whom he formed into a club called the 
"Junto," devoted to inquiry and debate. At his suggestion 
the members of this club kept their books in common at 
the clubroom for a while ; and out of this grew the first 
circulating library in America — the germ of the American 
public library system. And in 1732 he issued the first 
number of '' Poor Richard's Almanack," which continued 
to appear every year for a quarter of a century. 

It was '' Poor Richard's Almanack " which first made 
Franklin famous, and it was out of the mouth of Poor 
Richard that Franklin spoke most effectively to his fellow- 
countrymen. He had noticed that the almanac was often 
the only book in many houses, and he therefore ''filled 
all the little spaces that occurred between the remarkable 
days in the calendar with proverbial sentences, chiefly 
such as inculcated industry and frugality as the means of 
procuring wealth, and thereby securing virtue ; it being 



Poor Richard improved : 

BEING AN 

ALMANACK 

AND 

EPHEMERIS 

O F T H E 

Motions of the SUN and MOON; 

THE TRUE 

Places and Aspects of the Planets \ 

T H £• 

RISING and SETTING of the Sl/N; 

AND THE 

Rifmg, Setting and Southing ofti?e Moon, 

FOR THE 

Year of our LORD 1758: 
Being the Second after: Leap-Year, 

CoQtainlog aKOf 

The Lunations^ Conjunftions, Eclipfes, Judg 
ment of the Weather, Rifing and Setting of the 
Planets, Length of Days and Nights, Fairs, Courts, 
Roads, i^c. Together with ufeful Tables, chro- 
nologicaJObfervations, and entertaining Remarks. 

Fitted to the Latitude of Forty Degrees, and a Meridian of near 
five Hours Well rrom London ; but may, without fen ijbic Eriox, 
fcrve all the Nor t hek n Colonies. 

By^RJCH^RD SJUNDERS, Philom. 

PHILADELPHIA 
* Printed and Sold by B. f RAiiiCLZN, and D. Hall. 



26 



August hath xxxi Days. 



"dThT 

New J 3 8 aft. 
Firft Q^ 1 1 1 1 aft- 
PuU • i8 8 aft. I 
Laft Q^ Z5 six noon. 

23 25 Deg. 
24 |22 



Planets Places. 





ij^^Ricbard fays, '77/ foolijh to lay out Money 

iT^^JnaPurcbafe of Repentance \ and yet this 

" 2* Folly is praftifed every Day at Vendues, 

*3fbr want of minding the Almanack. 

^^Wlje Merit as /'^(^r Dick fays, /^ar» ^ 

*5 others Harms ^ FfioCs Jcarcefy fy tbeir o<wn j 

4 ^^ but, Felix quern jadtmt auena Fericula 

5 7 cautusn. Many a one, for the Sake of 
Finery on the Back, have gone with a 

^hungry Belly, and half fla!ived their Fa* 
^ , milies j Silks and Sa/ti/is, Scarlet andf^el- 
^ 'vetSy as P<?5r Richard fays, />/// *^z^/ M^ 
^ Kitcb^ Fire. Thcfe are not the NeceJTa 
'3 riV/ of Life ; they can fcareely be calledl 

4 the Convetuencia, znd yet only becaufc 

5 they look pretty, how many vjont to 

6 have them. The artificial Wants of Man- 

7 kind thus become more numerous than 

8 the natural ; and, as Poor Dick fays, For 

9 one poor Ferfon^ there afe an hundred in 
Indigent. By thefe, and other Exti-ava- 

Ki ganoies, the Genteel are reduced to Po 
'* verty, and forced to borrow of thcfe 
.^3 whom" they formerly defpifed, but who 
^^ through /Wz/yFry and Frugahfjhiyc main- 
*| tained their Standings in which Cafe it 
^ appears plainly, that a Ploughman on hi 
j^L^gs is higher than a Gentleman on bis 
KneeSf as Poor Richard f^y^ Perhaps 
^^ they nave had a fniall Eflate left them 
D * whioh 



27 



28 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

more difificult for a man in want to act always honestly, 
as, to use here one of these proverbs, 'It is hard for an 
empty sack to stand upright.' " By these pithy, pregnant 
sayings, carrying their moral home, fit to be pondered in 
the long winter evenings, Franklin taught Americans to 
be thrifty, to be forehanded, and to look for help from 
themselves only. 

The rest of the almanac was also interesting, especially 
the playful prefaces ; for Franklin was the first of Ameri- 
can humorists, and to this day he has not been surpassed 
in his own line. The best of the proverbs — not original, 
all of them, but all sent forth freshened and sharpened 
by Franklin's shrewd wit — he *' assembled and formed 
into a connected discourse, prefixed to the almanac of 
1757, as the harangue of a wise old man to the people 
attending an auction." 

Thus compacted, the scattered counsels sped up and 
down the Atlantic coast, being copied into all the news- 
papers. The wise ''Speech of Father Abraham" also 
traveled across the ocean and was reprinted in England 
as a broadside to be stuck up in houses for daily guidance ; 
it was twice translated into French — being probably the 
first essay by an American author which had a circulation 
outside the domains of our language. It has been issued 
since in German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Portu- 
guese, Gaelic, and Greek. Without question it is what it 
has been called — "the most famous piece of literature 
the colonies produced." 

No man had ever preached a doctrine which more skill- 
fully showed how to get the best for yourself ; and no 
man ever showed himself more ready than Franklin to 
do things for others. He invented an open stove to give 
more heat with less wood, but he refused to take out a 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 29 

patent for it, glad of an opportunity to serve his neigh- 
bors ; and this invention of Franklin's was the beginning 
of the great American stove trade of to-day. He founded 
the first fire company in Philadelphia, and so made a 
beginning for the present fire departments. He procured 
the reorganization of the night watch and the payment of 
the watchmen, thus preparing for the regular police force 
now established. He started a Philosophical Society ; and 
he took the lead in setting on foot an academy — which 
survives to this day as the University of Pennsylvania. 

While he was doing things for others, others did things 
for him, and he was made Clerk of the General Assembly 
in 1736, and Postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737. In 1750 
he was elected a member of the Assembly, and in 1753 
he was made Postmaster-general for all the colonies. In 
1748 he had retired from business, having so fitted his 
practice to his preaching that he had gained a competency 
when but forty-two years old. 

The leisure thus acquired he used in the study of 
electrical science, then in its infancy. He soon mastered 
all that was known, and then he made new experiments 
with his wonted ingenuity. He was the first to declare 
the identity of electricity and lightning. Using a wet 
string, he flew a kite against a thunder cloud, and drew, a 
spark from a key at the end of a cord. The lightning rod 
was his invention. Of his investigations and experiments 
he wrote reports that were printed in England and trans- 
lated in France. The Royal Society voted him a medal; 
the French king had the experiments repeated before him ; 
and both Harvard and Yale made Franklin a Master of 
Arts. 

But Franklin was not long allowed to live in philosophic 
retirement. When the French War broke out he was 



30 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

« 

appointed one of the commissioners sent by Pennsylvania 
to a congress of the colonies held at Albany. He wrote 
a pamphlet which aided the enlisting of troops ; and by 
pledging his own credit he helped General Braddock to get 
the wagons needed for the unfortunate expedition against 
Fort Duquesne. He drew up a Plan of Union on which 
the colonies might act together, and thus anticipated the 
Continental Congress of twenty years later. 

In 1757, when Pennsylvania could no longer bear the 
interference of the governor appointed by the proprietors, 
Franklin was sent to London as the representative of his 
fellow-citizens. It was more than thirty years since he 
had left England, a journeyman printer ; and now he 
returned to it, a man of fifty, the foremost citizen of Phila- 
delphia, the author of '' Father Abraham's Speech," and 
the discoverer of many new facts about electricity. 

He was gone nearly five years, successfully pleading the 
cause of Pennsyh^ania, and publishing a pamphlet which 
helped to prevent the restoration of Canada to the French. 
Then he came home, to be met by an escort of five hun- 
dred horsemen, and to be honored by a vote of thanks 
from the Assembly. 

But the dispute with the proprietors of the colony 
blazing forth again, Franklin was sent back to London 
once more to oppose the Stamp Act. He returned to 
England in 1764, at first as agent of Pennsylvania only, 
but in time as the representative of New Jersey, Georgia, 
and Massachusetts also ; and he remained for more than 
ten years, pleading the cause of the colonists against 
the king, and explaining to all who chose to listen 
the real state of feeling in America. He did what he 
could to get the first Stamp Act repealed. He gave a 
good account of himself when he was examined by a 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 3I 

committee of the House of Commons. He wrote telling 
papers of all sorts : one a set of '' Rules for Reducing a 
Great Empire to a Small One,'* and another purporting 
to advance the claim of the King of Prussia to levy taxes 
in Great Britain — just as the King of England asserted 
the right to lay taxes on the Americans. He lingered 
in London, doing all he could to avert the war which he 
felt to be inevitable. At last, in 1775, less than a month 
before the battle of Lexington, he sailed for home. 

On the day after he landed he was chosen a member of 
the Second Continental Congress. He acted as Postmas- 
ter-general. He signed the Declaration of Independence, 
making answer to Harrison's appeal for unanimity : ** Yes, 
we must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang 
separately." Then there appeared to be a hope that 
France might be induced to help us ; and in September, 
1776, Franklin was elected envoy. Being then seventy 
years old, he went to Europe for the fourth time. 

In France he received such a welcome as no other 
American had ever met with. He was known as an 
author, as a philosopher, as a statesman. The king and 
the queen, the court and the people, all were his friends. 
His portraits were everywhere, and his sayings were re- 
peated by everybody. In the magnificence of the palace 
of Versailles Franklin kept his dignified simplicity ; and 
with his customary sagacity he turned to the advantage of 
his country all the good will shown to himself. After Bur- 
goyne's surrender the French agreed to an open alliance 
with the United States, and Franklin, with his fellow- 
commissioners, signed the treaty in 1778. 

During the war Franklin remained in France as Ameri- 
can Minister, borrowing money, forwarding supplies, ex- 
changing prisoners, and carrying on an immense business 



32 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

on behalf of his country. As one of his biographers 
remarks, Franklin '' stood in the relation of a navy de- 
partment " to John Paul Jones when that hardy sailor was 
harassing the British coasts in the '' Bonhomme Richard/' 
— as his vessel was named, after ''Poor Richard.'' He 
bore the brunt of the countless difficulties which beset the 
American representatives in Europe. At last Cornwallis 
surrendered; and, with Adams and Jay, Franklin signed 
the treaty of peace with Great Britain, in September, 
1783. The next year Jefferson went to France, and in 
1785 relieved Franklin, who was allowed to return to 
America, being then seventy-nine years of age. 

His ''Autobiography," which he had begun in 1771 in 
England, and had taken up again in France in 1783, he 
hoped to be able to finish now that he was at home again 
and relieved from the responsibility of office. But he was 
at once elected a councillor of Philadelphia, and although 
he would have liked the leisure he had so hardly earned, 
he felt that he had no right to refuse this duty. Then was 
the " critical period of American history," and Franklin 
was kept busy writing to his friends in Europe encouraging 
and hopeful accounts of our affairs. 

When the constitutional convention met, Franklin was 
made a member " that, in the possible absence of General 
Washington, there might be some one whom all could 
agree in calling to the chair." After the final draft of the 
Constitution was prepared, Franklin made a speech plead- 
ing for harmony, and urging that the document be sent 
before the people with the unanimous approbation of the 
members of the convention. Then, while the last mem- 
bers were signing, he said that he had seen a sun painted 
on the back of the President's chair, and during the long 
debates when there seemed little hope of an agreement he 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 33 

had been in doubt whether it was taken at the moment of 
sunrise or sunset; "but/* he said, ''now at length I have 
the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting 
sun." 

He was now a very old man. He said himself : *' I seem 
to have intruded myself into the company of posterity, 
when I ought to have been abed and asleep." His cheer- 
fulness never failed him, and although he suffered much, 
he bore up bravely. '* When I consider," he wrote in 
1788, ''how many more terrible maladies the human body 
is liable to, I think myself well off that I have only three 
incurable ones : the gout, the stone, and old age." He 
looked forward to death without fear, writing to a friend 
that, as he had seen "a good deal of this world," he felt 
"a growing curiosity to be acquainted with some other." 

For a year or more before his death he was forced to 
keep his bed. When at last the end was near and a pain 
seized him in the chest, it was suggested that he change 
his position and so breathe more easily. "A dying man 
can do nothing easily," he answered; and these were his 
last words. He died April 17, 1790, respected abroad and 
beloved at home. 

In many ways Franklin was the most remarkable man 
who came to maturity while these United States were yet 
British colonies ; and nothing, perhaps, was more remark- 
able about him than the fact that he was never "colonial " 
in his attitude. He stood before kings with no uneasy 
self-consciousness or self-assertion ; and he faced a com- 
mittee of the House of Commons with the calm strength 
of one thrice armed in a just cause. He never bragged 
or blustered ; he never vaunted his country or himself. 
He was always firm and dignified, shrewd and good- 
humored. 





i 



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i 1 i ■{' 

1 \.i y 






^4m 
^1 



1 




^ 




S 



I 



34 










1 




35 



36 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Humor, indeed, he had so abundantly that it was almost 
a failing. Like Abraham Lincoln, another typical Ameri- 
can, he never shrank from a jest. Like Lincoln, he knew 
the world well and accepted it for what it was, and made 
the best of it, expecting no more. But Franklin lacked the 
spirituality, the faith in the ideal, which was at the core 
of Lincoln's character.- And here was Franklin's limita- 
tion : what lay outside of the bounds of common sense 
he did not see — probably he did not greatly care to see; 
but common sense he had in a most uncommon degree. 

One of his chief characteristics was curiosity — in the 
wholesome meaning of that abused word. He never rested 
till he knew the why and the wherefore of all that aroused 
his attention. As the range of his interests was extraordi- 
narily wide, the range of his information came to be very 
extended also. He was thorough, too ; he had no toler- 
ance for superficiality ; he went to the bottom of whatever 
he undertook to investigate. He had the true scientific 
spirit. He loved knowledge for its own sake, although he 
loved it best, no doubt, when it could be made immedi- 
ately useful to his fellow-men. In science, in politics, in 
literature, he was eminently practical ; in whatever depart- 
ment of human endeavor he was engaged, he brought the 
same qualities to bear. For the medal which was pre- 
sented to Franklin in France the great statesman Turgot 
composed the line : 

Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis ^ ; 

and it was true that Franklin had faced the ministers of 
George HI. with the same fearless eye that had gazed at 
the thunder cloud. 

^ He has seized the Hghtning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants. 



BENJAiMlN FRANKLLN 37 

There is an admirable series in course of publication 
containing the lives of American men of letters, and there 
is an equally admirable series containing the lives of 
American statesmen. In each of these collections there 
is a volume devoted to Benjamin Franklin ; and if there 
were also a series of American scientific men, the story of 
Franklin's life would need to be told anew for that also. 
No other American could make good his claim to be in- 
cluded even in two of these three collections. 

As science advances, the work of the discoverers of the 
past, even though it be the foundation of a new departure, 
may sink more and more out of sight. As time goes on, 
and we prosper, the memory of our indebtedness to each 
of the statesmen who assured the stability of our institu- 
tions may fade away. But the writer of a book which the 
people have taken to heart is safe in their remembrance ; 
and, perhaps, to-day it is as the author of his ''Autobiogra- 
phy " that Franklin is best known. If he were alive, prob- 
ably nothing would surprise him more than that he should 
be ranked as a man of letters, for he was not an author by 
profession. He was not moved to composition by desire 
of fortune or of fame ; he wrote always to help a cause, to 
attain a purpose ; and the cause having been won, the pur- 
pose having been achieved, he thought no more about what 
he had written. He had a perfect understanding of the 
people he meant to reach, and of the means whereby he 
could best reach them. 

Most of these writings were mere journalism, to be for- 
gotten when its day's work was done ; but some of them 
had so much merit of their own that they have survived 
the temporary debate w.hich called them into being. Wit 
is a great antiseptic, and it has kept sweet the ''Whistle," 
the "Petition of the Left Hand," the "Dialogue between 



38 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Franklin and the Gout," and the lively little essay on the 
•'Ephemera." Wisdom is not so common even now that 
men can afford to forget ''Father Abraham's Speech/' the 
" Necessary Hints to Those that would be Rich," and 
"Digging for Hidden Treasure." Much of his fun is as 
fresh and as unforced now as it was a century and a half 
ago. Much of the counsel he gives so pleasantly, so 
gently, so wisely, is as needful now as it was when " Poor 
Richard " sent forth his first almanac. 

He taught his fellow-countrymen to be masters of the 
frugal virtues. He taught them to attain to self-support 
that they might be capable of self-sacrifice. He taught 
them not to look to the government for help, but to stand 
ready always to help the government if need be. There 
are limits to his doctrine, no doubt ; and there are things 
undreamt of in Franklin's philosophy. Yet, his philosophy 
was good so far as it went; in its own field to this day 
there is no better. Common sense cannot comprehend 
all things ; but it led Franklin to try to help people to be 
happy, for he believed that this was the best way to make 
them good. 

It was by watching and by thinking that Franklin 
arrived at his wisdom ; and it was not by chance that he 
was able to set forth his views so persuasively. Skill in 
letters is never a lucky accident. How rigorously he 
trained himself in composition he has told us in the 
"Autobiography" — how he pondered on his parts of 
speech and practiced himself in all sorts of literary gym- 
nastics. And of the success of his training there is no 
better proof than the "Autobiography" itself. It is a 
marvelous volume, holding its own to-day beside "Robin- 
son Crusoe," as one of the books which are a perpetual 
delight to young and to old, to the scholar familiar with 



BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 39 

Franklin's achievements, and to the boy just able to spell 
out its simplest sentences. It is one of the best books 
of its kind in any language, and it abides as the chief 
monument of Benjamin Franklin's fame. 

Questions. — Tell the story of Franklin's life in Boston. 

Describe the publication that first made Franklin famous. 

Mention several facts which go to show that Franklin preached self- 
ishness in order that he might encourage philanthropy. How did he 
spend his leisure ? 

Trace Franklin^s public career before the war for independence. 

Speak of his public services during the war. 

What things happened to prevent Franklin from completing, during 
the critical period of American history, a literary work upon which he 
had long been engaged ? 

Describe Franklin's last years. 

Show how Franklin's chief characteristic was manifested in his life. 

In what three fields was Franklin famous ? 

How was Franklin able to invest his v/ritings with the qualities that 
have preserved them from sharing the neglect usually bestowed upon 
productions of their class ? 

Note. — The best edition of Franklin's complete works, including his corre- 
spondence, is that in 10 volumes by A. H. Smyth (Macmillan). The fullest edition 
of the " Autobiography" is that of John Bigelow (Lippincott, 3 vols.). There is a 
condensed edition in the Riverside Literature series (Houghton Mifflin) ; and the 
same series has also one number containing " Poor Richard's Almanack " and other 
selections from Franklin's writings. 

There are biographies by James Parton (Houghton Mifflin, 2 vols.), by |. T. 
Morse, Jr. in the American Statesmen series (Houghton Mifflin), by J. B. McMaster 
in the American Men of Letters series (Houghton Mifflin), and by Paul Leicester 
Ford (Century). 




IV WASHINGTON IRVING 



The first American man of letters, Benjamin Franklin, 
was a man of letters only incidentally, and, as it were, 
accidentally ; for he was a printer by trade, a politician 
by choice, and never an author by profession. 

The first American who frankly adopted literature as a 
calling, and who successfully relied on his pen for his 
support, was Washington Irving. The first American 
who was a professed author was not Franklin, who was 
born a Bostonian and who died a Philadelphian ; but Irving, 
who was born, who lived, and who died a New Yorker. 

40 



WASHINGTON IRVING 41 

Washington Irving's father was a Scotchman who had 
settled in New York a dozen years before the Revolution. 
During the British occupation of Manhattan Island, the 
Irvings were stanch patriots, and did what they could to 
relieve the sufferings of the American prisoners in the 
city. A few months before the evacuation day, which the 
inhabitants of New York were to keep as a holiday for a 
century after, Washington Irving was born, on April 3, 
1783, being, like Benjamin Franklin, the youngest of many 
sons. The boy was not baptized until after Washington 
and his army had entered the city. '' Washington's work 
is ended," said the mother, *'and the child shall be named 
after him." 

New York came out of the Revolution half in ruins, and 
wasted by its long captivity ; its straggling streets filled 
only the toe of the island, and it had less than twenty-five 
thousand inhabitants. But the little city began to grow 
again as soon as peace returned. It was in New York, in 
1789, that Washington took the oath as the first President 
of these United States. One day not long thereafter a 
Scotch maidservant of the Irvings, struck with the enthu- 
siasm which everywhere greeted the great man, followed 
him into a shop with the youngest son of the family, and 
said, '* Please, your honor, here's a bairn was named for 
you/' Washington placed his hand on the head of the 
boy, and gave him his blessing. 

New York was then the capital of the country ; it was 
a spreading seaport ; it retained many traces of its Dutch 
origin ; it had in its streets men of every calling and of 
every color. Here the boy grew up happy, going to 
school and getting knowledge out of books, but also linger- 
ing along the pier heads, and picking up the information 
to be gathered in that best of universities — a great city. 



42 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

He was playful rather than studious ; and although two of 
his brothers had been educated at Columbia College, he 
neglected to enter — a blunder which he regretted all his 
life, and which Columbia regrets to this day. Perhaps 
the fault may be charged to his poor health, for the sake 
of improving which he began to live much in the open 
air, making voyages up the Hudson in sloops that then 
plied as packets between New York and Albany. The 
first sail through the Highlands was to him a time of 
intense delight, and the Catskill Mountains had the most 
witching effect on his boyish imagination. Nowadays we 
are used to hearing the Hudson praised, but it was Irving 
who first proclaimed its enchanting beauty ; and it was 
when he was a dreaming youth that he discovered its 
charm. 

Much against the grain he began to read law, but his 
studies were only fitful. One of his brothers established 
a daily paper in 1802 ; and to this Washington, then only 
nineteen, contributed a series of occasional essays under 
the signature of '' Jonathan Oldstyle." These were humor- 
ous and sportive papers, and they were copied far and 
wide, as the sayings of Poor Richard had been quoted 
fifty years before. 

The next summer, Irving made a journey up the 
Mohawk, to Ogdensburg, and thence to Montreal. The 
year after, being then just twenty-one, his brothers sent 
him to Europe in the hope that the long sea voyage and 
the change of scene might restore him to health. Irving 
had to be helped up the side of the ship, and the captain 
said to himself, '* There's a chap who will go overboard 
before we get across." The voyage did him good, and 
from Bordeaux he went to Genoa ; he pushed on as tar 
as Sicily, and came back to Rome ; then turned north to 



1 



WASHINGTON IRVING 43 

Paris, and finally crossed over to London. After a year 
and a half of most enjoyable wandering he took ship again 
for home, and arrived safely in New York after a stormy 
passage of sixty-four days. 

Washington Irving now returned to the study of law, 
and he was soon admitted to the bar — a proof rather of 
the mercy of the examiners than of the amount of his legal 
knowledge. He never made any serious attempt to earn 
his living as a lawyer. Only a few weeks after his admis- 
sion, he, his brother William, and his friend James K. 
Paulding, sent forth the first number of "Salmagundi," an 
irregular periodical suggested, perhaps, by the '^ Spectator" 
of Addison and Steele, but droller, more waggish, and 
with sharper shafts for folly as it flies. The first number 
was published in January, 1807, and caused not only great 
amusement, but also much wonder as to the real names of 
the daring authors. The twentieth, and final number, 
appeared a year later. Irving always spoke of it as a very 
juvenile production, and such it is, no doubt ; but it was 
brisk and lively, indeed it was brighter than anything of 
the kind yet written in America ; and in the papers con- 
tributed by Washington Irving we can see the germs of 
certain of his later works. 

One of these papers pretended to be a chapter from 
"The Chronicles of the Renowned and Ancient City of 
Gotham," 1 and Irving's next literary undertaking was a 
burlesque history of New York, v/hich he and his brother 
Peter undertook to write together. The brothers had 
heaped up many notes when Peter was called away, and 
Washington, changing the plan of the book, began to 
write it alone. He started on his labor joyful and happy, 

^ Gotham was an English village proverbial for the blundering simplicity 
of its inhabitants. Irving humorously applied the name to New York. 



44 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

but he ended it in the depths of sorrow. He was in love 
with Miss Matilda Hoffman, a charming and graceful girl, 
and their marriage had been agreed on. Suddenly, having 
caught a bad cold, which went to her lungs, after a brief 
illness she died. Irving, then twenty-six, bore the blow 
like a man, but he carried the scar to the grave. To his 
most intimate friends he never mentioned her name. For 
several months after her death he wandered aimlessly, 
unable to apply himself to anything. Then he went back 
to his work, and finished the burlesque history of New 
York. It may seem strange that a book of such bubbling 
humor should be the result of those days of darkness ; but 
as has often happened in literature, the writings at which 
people laugh longest are the work of men who are grave 
rather than gay. 

'' A History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker," 
was published in December, 1809. It was a playful parody 
of the annals of New Amsterdam, laughing at the Dutch 
burghers who had founded the capital of New Netherlands, 
and making fun of their manners and their customs. In the 
method of the author there was more than a trace of the 
manner of '' Don Quixote," and its irony was as gentle and 
as good-natured. That '' Knickerbocker " was received with 
acclamation there is no wonder. It was the most readable 
book which had yet appeared in America — for Franklin's 
''Autobiography" did not get into print until 1817. At 
home it gave a name to a time in New York^s history and 
to a set of the city's traditions, a name even now in popular 
use, for every one knows what is meant when we speak of 
a person or a thing as a " Knickerbocker." Abroad it 
revealed to the critics that American life was to have its 
own literature. Scott read the book aloud to his family. 
The book still delights all who can appreciate its delicate 



WASHINGTON IRVING 45 

fun ; nowadays our taste in humor is more highly spiced 
than it was when '' Knickerbocker " appeared, but it is not 
purer. 

The protests which a few descendants of the Dutch 
founders of the city ventured to put forth were laughed 
aside, for the public had taken the joke and were unwilling 
to have the fun spoiled. Yet it is to be regretted that, in 
his youth, Irving should have echoed the British scoffs at 
the Dutch. We are rarely fair to our rivals, and the 
Dutch had not only taught the British agriculture and 
commerce, but they had swept the British Channel with a 
broom at their admiral's masthead ; and so the British dis- 
liked them. Foremost in art, and in law, and in education, 
the Dutch had exerted a most wholesome influence on 
American institutions — the chief of which, our common- 
school system, was probably derived from Holland. Irving 
did not think of this when he made fun of the Dutchmen 
of New Amsterdam, or he did not know it. There was 
no malice in his satire ; but thoughtlessness sometimes 
hurts as severely. 

For ten years after the publication of " Knickerbocker," 
Irving brought forth no new work. He lingered and loi- 
tered and hesitated. He went to Washington for a season, 
and he edited a magazine in Philadelphia. When the War 
of 18 12 broke out, he was stanchly patriotic, although 
he deplored the war itself. After hostilities had lasted 
for some months, he felt it was his duty to offer his 
services to the governor of New York, and was appointed 
aid and military secretary. In 181 5, after peace was pro- 
claimed, he made another voyage across the Atlantic to 
England to see his brother. Intending only a brief visit, 
he was absent from home, as it happened, for seventeen 
years. 



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48 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In England and in Scotland he met the literary celebri- 
ties of the day, among them Sir Walter Scott. At last he 
turned again to literature, and the first number of ** The 
Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent/' was published in 
New York in 1819. The '' Sketch Book" was a miscellany 
of essays, sketches, and tales. As Irving wrote to a friend, 
he had *^ attempted no lofty theme, nor sought to look wise 
and learned.*' **I have preferred," he said, *' addressing 
myself to the feeling and fancy of the reader more than to 
his judgment." The first number contained the '* Voyage 
to England" and *' Rip Van Winkle." Its success was 
instant and remarkable. As the following numbers .ap- 
peared, they began to be reprinted in British periodicals ; 
and so Irving, still detained in England, gathered the first 
four numbers into a volume and issued it in London. The 
series extended to seven numbers in America; and on 
both sides of the Atlantic the complete book was published 
in two volumes toward the end of 1820. Thereafter Irving 
had a secure place in the history of English literature. 

The charm of the *' Sketch Book" is not difficult to 
define. Sunshine lights up every page, and a cheerful 
kindliness glows upon them all. From the *' Sketch 
Book " we must date the revival of Christmas feasting, 
although, no doubt, Irving was aided powerfully by Dick- 
ens, who took the American as his model in more ways 
than we are wont to remark. It is the *' Sketch Book" 
which has sent thousands of Americans across the Atlan- 
tic, passionate pilgrims to Stratford, entranced wanderers 
through Westminster Abbey, and happy loiterers in the 
country churchyards of England. Although in the second 
number of the ''Sketch Book," Irving warned ''English 
Writers on America" that their ill-considered reports were 
likely to cause ill will, no American ever felt more kindly 



i 



WASHINGTON IRVING 49 

toward England; and when he died, Thackeray, calling 
him '' the first ambassador whom the New World of 
Letters sent to the Old," praised him for his constant 
good will to the mother country. 

Though Irving was stalwart in his Americanism always, 

— he refused, for example, to write for the Quarterly Re- 
vieWy because it had ever been a bitter enemy to America 

— he had a sincere liking for England, and a hearty ap- 
preciation of its picturesque possibilities. This was shown 
to advantage in his next book, '* Bracebridge Hall," pub- 
lished in 1822; and it was seen even in the book that 
followed this — the *^ Tales of a Traveler," published in 
1824. These two collections may be described not un- 
fairly as continuations of the '^ Sketch Book," the former 
containing chiefly essays and sketches, and the latter, only 
short stories and character portraits. There is in all the 
libraries of England no book more filled with the gentle 
spirit of English country life than *^ Bracebridge Hall"; 
and Irving himself never wrote a more delicately humorous 
sketch than the ''Stout Gentleman," in that volume. 

In the history of the short-story, one of the most useful 
as it is one of the most popular of literary forms, Irving 
holds a high place. The ''Sketch Book" owed much of 
its success to " Rip Van Winkle " and the ** Legend of 
Sleepy Hollow" — tales of a kind till then unknown in 
English literature ; and " Dolph Heyliger," in " Brace- 
bridge Hall," is a worthy third, while " Wolfert Webber," 
in the "Tales of a Traveler," is not far behind. Consider 
ing their strength, Irving's short-stories have a singular 
simplicity ; they are slight in plot and simple in the char- 
acter drawing. He understood his own powers clearly. 
" I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch 
my materials," so he wrote 'to a friend ; "it is the play of 



50 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

thought, and sentiment, and language ; the weaving in of 
characters, lightly yet expressively delineated ; the familiar 
and faithful exhibition of scenes of common life ; and the 
half-concealed vein of humor that is often playing through 
the whole ; these are among what I aim at." . 

This is a fair statement of the qualities which give 
charm to ''Rip Van Winkle" and its fellows. Little did 
Irving foresee that these tales of his were but the first 
fruits of that abundant harvest, rich in local flavor, which 
later American story tellers were to raise, each on his own 
half acre. Hawthorne and Poe, Bret Harte and Aldrich, are 
all followers in Irving's footsteps. 

It was while Byron and Scott were the leaders of Eng- 
lish letters that Irving published the ** Sketch Book," and 
made good his own title to an honorable position in litera- 
ture. By the publication of *' Bracebridge Hall," and of 
the '' Tales of a Traveler," his footing became firmer, no 
doubt ; but he did not advance further. Irving was in 
Spain in 1826, and there he remained for more than three 
years — the most laborious and fruitful years of his life. 
He had gone to Spain to translate some important 
Spanish documents concerning Columbus ; but getting 
interested in the character and in the career of Columbus, 
he soon settled down to the preparation of a biography 
of his own. He took his task seriously ; he spared no 
pains in getting every date right and every proper name 
exact ; he rewrote as often as he discovered new material. 
He knew that a biography was not a work of fiction, to be 
warped at the will of the writer, but rather a monument to 
be built slowly out of actual facts. 

When the ''Life of Columbus" appeared in 1828, it was 
seen at once that Irving had not only the gift of the born 
story teller, but also the sterner virtues of the historian. 



WASHINGTON IRVING 51 

To this day, despite the storm of dispute which has raged 
over every item of Columbus's career, Irving's biography 
remains a valuable authority. A most devoted student of 
the details of Columbus's life has declared that Irving's 
*'is a history written with judgment and impartiality, which 
leaves far behind it all descriptions of the discovery of the 
New World published before or since." If to-day it were 
edited with notes embodying the latest information, it 
would hold its own against all newcomers. The reader 
sees a completed painting, and not the raw materials out 
of which he is invited to make a picture for himself. 

The ^* Life of Columbus" was soon followed by a book 
about the ''Companions of Columbus," and by the 
"Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada," which Irving 
regarded as his best work, and which Coleridge greeted 
as a masterpiece of its kind. Just what its kind is, it is 
not easy to declare, but perhaps it may be described as a 
record of fact presented with the freedom the author had 
used in writing fiction. In the main, it is a true story, 
but it is as obedient to the hands of the story teller as 
though he had made it up. The narrative is spirited, the 
style is delightful, and there is a never-ending play of 
sentiment and humor. 

These are the qualities which grace yet another Spanish 
book, the " Alhambra," perhaps the most fascinating of all 
Irving's writings. The " Alhambra " is a medley of travel, 
sketches, character studies, and brief tales ; it is what 
Prescott called it : a Spanish "Sketch Book." The method 
of the author is the same as in his "Sketch Book," only 
he has changed the model who poses before him. " Brace- 
bridge Hall" is not more English than the " Alhambra " 
is Spanish. It is full of the. sights and the sounds of 
Spain ; and it is pleasant to gaze upon this reflec- 



52 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

tion of Moorish architecture and Iberian landscape and 
Spanish character in the clear mirror held up to nature 
by the genial New Yorker. 

The ''Alhambra" was published in 1832, and after an 
absence of seventeen years, Irving returned to his native 
city. He found New York wonderfully expanded ; in the 
scant half-century of his life, the twenty thousand popula- 
tion had increased to two hundred thousand. He was made 
heartily welcome, and his fellow-citizens promptly bestowed 
on him the compliment of a public dinner. From that day 
to his death he was the acknowledged head of American 
letters. He bore his honors as easily as he bore all things. 

He made a home for himself in the village of Tarrytown, 
New York, on the banks of the Hudson he loved, and near 
the Sleepy Hollow he had celebrated. Here, in the stone 
cottage of Sunnyside, he settled down, enjoying the leisure 
which now and again he varied by periods of hard labor. 
He made a tour on the prairies ; he wrote an account of 
the settlement of Astoria in Oregon ; he put into shape 
the travels of Captain Bonneville ; and he began work on 
a history of the conquest of Mexico, but with his wonted 
generosity he surrendered the subject to Prescott when he 
was told that the younger author was about to undertake it. 

Thus ten years passed away; and in 1842 Irving was 
making ready to write the life of Washington, when he was 
surprised by the appointment of Minister to Spain. Daniel 
Webster was then Secretary of State, and he knew no 
American could be more welcome in Spain than the biog- 
rapher of Columbus. A foreign appointment is almost the 
only honor a republic can bestow^ upon its foremost authors ; 
the first of American men of letters, Benjamin Franklin, 
had been Minister to France ; and after Irving, similar 
[positions were to be held by Motley, and Bancroft, and 



WASHINGTON IRVING 



53 



Lowell. Irving accepted the appointment, and spent four 
years in Madrid, with occasional visits to Paris and to Lon- 
don. Then in 1846 he came home again, and settled down 
at Sunnyside for the last thirteen years of his happy life. 

Among the labors of these later years were the extend- 
ing of an earlier and briefer biography of Goldsmith, an 
account of Mahomet and his contemporaries, and a vol- 




Sunnyside 

ume of miscellanies, called '' Wolfert's Roost," containing 
sketches and stories like those in the ''Sketch Book" and 
the ''Alhambra." Tarrytown is only a few miles from 
New York, and Irving was a frequent visitor to the city 
of his birth. He has been described as walking along 
Broadway with his head ''slightly inclined to one side, the 
face . . . smoothly shaven," and the eyes "twinkling" 
with kindly humor and shrewdness. There was a chirping, 
cheery, old-school air in his whole appearance. 



54 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Washington Irving was at that time perhaps the best 
known of living Americans ; and he was then engaged on 
the biography of the best known of all Americans alive or 
dead. The first volume of Irving's *'Life of Washington*' 
appeared in 1855, and the work was completed in 1859. 
Irving was doubtful about its reception, but it became 
instantly popular ; it had a very large sale, and it was 
lauded by his fellow-historians. Bancroft praised the style, 
calling it *' masterly, clear, easy." Prescott wrote: ''You 
have done with Washington just as I thought you would, 
and, instead of a cold marble statue of a demigod, you 
have made him a being of flesh and blood, like ourselves 
— one with whom we can have sympathy/' 

In the year in which the final volume of the *' Washing- 
ton " was published, Irving died at Sunnyside on November 
28, 1859, being then seventy-six years old. American men 
of letters are a long-lived race ; Franklin, Emerson, Bryant, 
and Whittier lived to be older than Irving, while Long- 
fellow and Lowell were only a little younger at their 
deaths. Like Irving, they all died full of years and full of 
honors ; they all had led happy lives. 

No later American writer has surpassed him in charm. 
Before Irving had discovered the beauty of the Hudson, 
the river was as lovely as it is to-day, but its legends were 
little known. He it was who peopled the green nooks of 
Sleepy Hollow and the rocky crags of the Catskills. His 
genius was not stalwart or rugged, and it did not conquer 
admiration ; it won its way softly, by the aid of senti- 
ment and of humor. *' Knickerbocker's History," and the 
''Sketch Book," and the "Alhambra," are his titles to 
fame; not the "Columbus" or the "Washington." He 
had the conscience of the historian and he could color his 
narrative artistically and give it movement ; but others 



WASHINGTON IRVING 



55 



could do this as well as he. But to call into being a 
civilization, to give to a legend the substance of truth, to 
present a fiction, so that it passes for fact and is accepted 
by the people and gets into common speech — this is a 
feat very few authors have ever accomplished. Irving did 
it, and his greatest work is not any one of his books — it 
is the Knickerbocker legend. 

Questions. — What events were happening in and around New 
York during the early years of Irving's life? 

What can you say about -' Salmagundi '' ? 

Describe Irving's first important literary work. 

How was Irving occupied during the ten years that followed the 
publication of ^' Knickerbocker '' ? 

What was Thackeray's characterization of Irving? 

Discuss Irving's place in the history of the short-story. 

Comment upon four books which grew out of Irving's third visit to 
Europe. 

How were the ten years of Irving's life passed after his return home? 

Describe his last great literary work. 

What was the nature of Irvung's genius ? 



Note. -- The authorized edition of Irving's works is published by Putnam 
(i2 vols.), who has also issued in 2 vols, the correspondence of Irving with Henry 
Brevoort. There are many annotated editions of the " Sketch Book " and the 
" Tales of a Traveler." 

There are biographies by Pierre M. Irving (Putnam, 3 vols.) and by C. D. 
Warner in the American Men of Letters series (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see Lowell's " Fable for Critics " ; Thackeray's " Nil Nisi Bonum " 
in " Roundabout Papers " (Houghton Mifflin) ; C. D. Warner's " Work of Wash- 
ington Irving" (Harper) ; W. D. Ilowells in " My Literary Passions" (Harper) ; 
and G. W. Curtis in " Literary and Social Essays " (harper). 




V JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 



As Irving was the first American author whose writ- 
ings won favor outside of his native land, so another New 
Yorker, James Fenimore Cooper, was the first American 
author whose works gained a wide circulation outside of 
his native tongue. While the ''Sketch Book" was as 
popular in Great Britain as in the United States, the 
*'Spy," and the ''Pilot,'' and the "Last of the Mohicans," 
were as popular on the continent of Europe as they were 
in America, North and South. To the French and the 
Germans, to the Italians and the Spaniards, James Feni- 

56 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 



57 



more Cooper is as well known as Walter Scott. Irving was 
the first American writer of short-stories, but Cooper was 
the first American noveUst; and, to the present day, he 
is almost the only American novelist whose fame is solidly 
established among foreigners. 

Born at Burlington, New Jersey, on September 15, 1789, 
Cooper was taken in infancy to Otsego Lake in the interior 




Otsego Hall 

of New York ; and here, at the point where the Susque- 
hanna streams forth on its way to join the distant Chesa- 
peake, Cooper*s father built the stately mansion called 
Otsego Hall. The elder Cooper was the owner of many 
thousand acres along the head waters of the Susque- 
hanna, and in this wilderness, centering around the 
freshly founded village of Cooperstown, the son grew into 
boyhood. He could pass his days on the beautiful lake, 



58 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

shut in by the untouched forest, or in the woods them- 
selves which rose with the hills and fell away into the 
valleys. He slept at night amid the solemn silence of a 
little settlement, a hundred miles beyond the advancing 
line of civilization. 

Hard as it may be for us to realize it to-day, at that time 
"the backwoods " were in the state of New York. It was 
only during the Revolution that the people of our stock 
made ready to push their way across the Alleghanies. For 
years after the nineteenth century had begun, the only 
white men who sped down the Mississippi, or toiled slowly 
up against its broad current, spoke another tongue than 
ours. Although Cooper lived in New York, it was in the 
backwoods that he spent his childhood, and to Cooperstown 
he returned at intervals throughout his life. Backwoods 
scenes and backwoods characters he could always recall 
at will from his earliest recollections. The craft of the 
woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of 
the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his youth up, just 
as the eery legends of North Britain and the stirring ballads 
of the Border had been absorbed by Walter Scott. 

Franklin never had the chance of a college education ; 
Irving was fitted for Columbia, but did not enter ; Cooper 
entered Yale, but did not graduate — and the fault was his 
own. It was thought that the sea would cure his tendency 
to frolic. The Naval Academy had not then been estab- 
lished, and the customary training for a career on a man- 
of-war was to gain experience in the merchant marine. 
So in the fall of 1806, when Cooper was seventeen, he 
sailed on a merchant vessel for a year's cruise, shipping 
before the mast, and seeing not a little hard service. 
Soon after his return he received a commission as a mid- 
shipman in the regular navy. 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 



59 



It was a time of peace, although the war with Great 
Britain already was foreseen. In 1808 Cooper was one of 
a party sent to Oswego, on Lake Ontario, to build a six- 
teen-gun brig. In 1809 he was left for a while in com- 
mand of the gunboats on Lake Champlain. In the same 
year he was attached to the ''Wasp," then commanded by 
Lawrence — the Lawrence who was soon to command the 
*' Chesapeake " in the action with the "Shannon," and 
who was to die with the immortal phrase on his lips, 
''Don't give up the ship!" Although Cooper saw no 
fighting during the three years and a half in which he 
wore the uniform of his country, he greatly increased his 
store of experience, adding to his knowledge of life before 
the mast on a merchant vessel an understanding of life on 
the quarter-deck of a man-of-war, besides gaining acquaint- 
ance with the Great Lakes. 

In January, 181 1, Cooper married Miss De Lancey, 
with whom he was to live happily for more than forty 
years. Apparently at the request of his bride, he resigned 
from the navy in May. He dwelt at Mamaroneck in West- 
chester county. New York, for several years, at first with 
his wife's father, and then in a hired house. In 18 17, 
after a three years' stay in Cooperstown, he went back to 
Westchester, the home of his wife's childhood, and there 
he remained for five years. Seemingly content with the 
simple life of a well-to-do country gentleman. Cooper 
reached the age of thirty without any attempt at author- 
ship — without even the hankering after pen and ink 
which is the characteristic of most predestined authors. 
The novelist fiowers late ; Scott was forty-three when his 
first novel, *'Waverley" was published; and Hawthorne 
was forty-six when the "Scarlet Letter" appeared; but 
they had been writing from their boyhood. 



6o AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Cooper^s entry into authorship was almost accidental. 
Reading some cheap British novel, he was seized with the 
idea that he could do as well himself ; and the result was 
his first book, '' Precaution," pubUshed late in 1820. '' Pre- 
caution " was an imitation of the average British novel of 
that time ; it had merit equal to that of most of its models ; 
it was a tale of life in England, and there was nothing to 
show that its author was not an Englishman. Indeed, 
when the book was republished in London, it was reviewed 
with no suspicion of its. American authorship. 

That Cooper, a most loyal and ardent American, should 
write a second-hand story of this sort, shows how complete 
was the colonial dependence of the United States on Great 
Britain in the first quarter of the nineteenth century — so 
far at least as letters were concerned. American litera- 
ture did not exist. No one had yet declared that the one 
thing out of which an American literature could be made 
was American life. When Cooper's ''Precaution" was 
written, Irving's ** Sketch Book " was being published in 
parts ; it was still incomplete, and half of the sketches in 
the book were from English subjects. 

Yet it seems to have struck Cooper that if he did not 
fail with a novel describing British life, of which he knew 
little, he might succeed with a novel describing Ameri- 
can life, of which he knew much. '' Waverley" had been 
published in 18 14, and in the next six years had appeared 
eight others of the ''Scotch novels," as they were called ; 
and in the very year of Cooper's first book, Scott had 
crossed the Border and produced in "Ivanhoe" really the 
first English historical novel, applying the method of the 
anonymous Scotch stories to an English theme. Cooper 
perceived that the same method could be applied to an 
American historical theme ; and in the " Spy," which 










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\ 



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62 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

was published in 1821, he gave us the first American 
historical novel. 

The '' Spy *' is a story of the Revolution, and its scene is 
laid in the Westchester which Cooper knew so well, and 
which had been a neutral ground, harried in turn by the 
British and the Americans : the '* Cowboys" and the ''Skin- 
ners/' The time and the place were well chosen, and they 
almost sufficed of themselves to lend romance to any ad- 
ventures the author might describe ; and even better 
chosen was the central figure, Harvey Birch, one of the 
most interesting and effective of romantic characters. To 
the Spy himself, mysterious but winning, was chiefly due 
the instant success — and the success of the story was 
extraordinary, not only in the United States at first, and a 
few months later in Great Britain, but on the continent of 
Europe. It was translated into French by the translator 
of the Waverley novels ; and it was afterward rendered 
into most of the modern languages in turn. 

Encouraged by the plaudits of the public on both sides of 
the Atlantic, Cooper wrote another story, the ''Pioneers," 
published in 1823. As the *' Spy " was the first American 
historical novel, so was the "Pioneers" the first attempt 
to put into fiction what is perhaps as worthy of record as 
anything in American history — the life on the frontier 
and the character of the backwoodsman. Here Cooper 
was on firm ground ; and although he did not fully realize 
the opportunity before him, his book was a revelation to 
the rest of the world. In it appeared for the first time 
one of the very greatest characters in fiction, the old 
woodsman, Natty Bumppo — the Leatherstocking who was 
to give his name to the series of tales which to-day is 
Cooper's best monument. In this first book we have but 
a faint sketch of the character the author afterward worked 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 



63 



out with loving care. Rarely is there a successful sequel 
to a successful novel, but Cooper returned to Leatherstock- 
ing again and again, until the history of his adventures 
was complete in five independent tales, the composition of 
which extended over eighteen years. 

Leaving for the moment Cooper's other writings, it may 
be well to note here that the *^ Pioneers" was followed in 
1826 and 1827 by the ''Last of the Mohicans" and the 
"Prairie,*' and in 1840 and 1841 by the ''Pathfinder" and 
the "Deerslayer." This was the order in which they were 
written, but very different is the order in which they are 
to be read when we wish to follow the career of Natty 
Bumppo from the days of his youth, and to trace the de- 
velopment of his noble and captivating character. The 
latest written is the earliest to be read in the sequence of 
events; after the "Deerslayer" comes the "Last of the 
Mohicans," followed by the "Pathfinder" and then the 
"Pioneers," until in the "Prairie" the series ends with 
the death of Leatherstocking. The five tales vary in value, 
no doubt, but taken altogether they reveal a marvelous gift 
of narration, and an extraordinary fullness of invention. 
Merely as stories their interest is unfailing, while they are 
ennobled by the character of Natty. 

Even before the publication of the " Pioneers," in which 
he introduced the American Indian into fiction. Cooper 
planned another story which was as daring a novelty. In 
1 82 1, the author of the Waverley novels, then unascer- 
tained, published the "Pirate." In Cooper's presence, 
the argument was advanced that Scott could not be the 
unknown author, since he was a lawyer, and this story 
revealed a knowledge of the ocean such as no landsman 
could have. Cooper, who had followed the sea himself, 
maintained that the "Pirate" showed that its author was 



64 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

not a sailor, since far greater effects could have been got 
out of the same materials if the writer had been a sea- 
farer by profession. To prove his point, Cooper deter- 
mined to write a sea story. Sailors there had been in 
fiction before, but no novel the scene of which was laid 
on the ocean ; and Cooper's friends tried to convince him 
that the public at large could not be interested in a life so 
technical as the seaman's. 

But Cooper persevered, and in 1823 he published the 
" Pilot," the first salt-water novel ever written, and to this 
day one of the very best. Its nameless and mysterious 
hero was a marine Harvey Birch ; obviously he had been 
modeled upon the Paul Jones whose name is held in terror 
to this day on the British coasts he harassed. In Long 
Tom Coffin, the Nantucket whaler, Cooper created the 
only one of his other characters worthy to take place 
beside Leatherstocking ; and Tom, like Natty, is simple, 
homely, and strong. In writing the *' Pilot," Cooper evi- 
dently had in mind the friends who thought it impossible 
to interest the general reader in a tale of the ocean, and he 
laid some of his scenes on land ; but it is these very pas- 
sages which are tedious to-day, while the scenes at sea 
keep their freshness and have still unfailing interest. 

In his second sea tale, the '* Red Rover," published in 
1829, Cooper avoided this blunder; after the story is 
fairly started the action passes continuously on the water, 
and the interest is therefore unbroken. The '' Red Rover " 
may be said to be wholly a tale of the ocean, as the '' Last 
of the Mohicans" is wholly a tale of the forest. Whether 
he was on the green billows or under the green trees. 
Cooper was completely at home; he drew from his own 
experience ; he told what he had seen, what he knew. He 
wrote ten sea tales in all, of which the *'T\vo Admirals" 



JAMES FENIMORE COOPER 65 

and " Wing-and-Wing," both published in 1842, are the 
best after the ^^ Pilot " and the ^' Red Rover." In 1839 
he sent forth his '' History of the United States Navy," 
to this day an accepted authority for the period of which it 
treats. 

It is by the ''Spy," by the five ''Leatherstocking Tales," 
and by the four or five foremost of the " Sea Tales " 
that Cooper's fame must be maintained. But he wrote 
many other novels, most of them of little importance. 
Some of them, like the ''Wept of Wish-ton-wish," were 
American in subject ; and some were European, like the 
** Bravo" and the ''Headsman." These last were the 
result of a long visit Cooper paid to Europe, extending 
from 1826 to 1833. In Paris he had the pleasure of meet- 
ing Scott ; and in Paris also he had the pleasure of defend- 
ing his country against ignorant insults. 

There is no need now to deny that Cooper seems to 
have enjoyed a dispute, and that he never went out of his 
way to avoid a quarrel. After he returned to the United 
States he became involved in numberless arguments of all 
sorts, personal, journalistic, literary, historical. He was 
frank, opinionated, and absolutely certain that he always 
had right on his side. Sure of his ground, he bore him- 
self bravely and battled stanchly to repel any attacks he 
had invited. 

His private life was most fortunate. His home was 
happy, and his wife and children were devoted to him. 
He had many friends ; and his best friends were the best 
citizens of New York. When he moved to that city, in 
1822, he founded a club, called sometimes after him, but 
more generally the "Bread and Cheese Lunch." To this 
club belonged Chancellor Kent ; the poets Fitz-Greene 
Halleck and William Cullen Bryant ; S. F. B. Morse, the 



66 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

inventor of the telegraph ; and other representatives of the 
arts, the sciences, and the learned professions. Before 
Cooper went to Europe in 1826 these friends gave him a" 
public dinner, at which Chancellor Kent presided and at 
which De Witt Clinton, the governor of the State, Win- 
field Scott, the head of the army, and Charles King, the 
future president of Columbia College, were present. After 
his return from Europe in 1833, ^h^ same group of distin- 
guished men tendered to him another banquet, which he 
declined. 

Nearly a score of years after, when he was sixty years 
old, and when he had lived through the storm of abuse 
which he had injudiciously aroused, his friends again made 
ready to give him a public testimonial of their regard ; but 
before the arrangements were perfected he died. He had 
retired to Cooperstown years before, and there with his 
family he had been happy, superintending work on his 
farm, and writing when he chose. His death took place 
on September 14, 185 i, at Cooperstown, to which he had 
been taken as an infant three score years before. Had he 
lived another day, he would have completed his sixty-second 
year. His wife outlived him less than five months. 

A few days after his death a meeting of prominent men 
was held, over which Washington Irving presided, and as 
a result of this, William Cullen Bryant was asked to deliver 
a discourse on the life and writings of Cooper. This ora- 
tion, spoken early in the next year, remained the best 
account of the novelist until the admirable biography in 
the American Men of Letters series appeared in 1882. 

A consideration of Cooper's place in English literature 
involves a comparison with Scott. In the first place, the 
Scotchman was the earlier of the two ; it was he who 
widened the field of the romance ; it was he who pushed 



JAMES fenimorp: cooper 6y 

the novel to the front and made fiction the successful rival 
of poetry and the drama ; it was he who showed all men 
how an historical novel might be written. Cooper is the 
foremost of Scott's followers, no doubt, and in skill of nar- 
ration, in the story-telling faculty, in the gift of imparting 
interest to the incidents of a tale, Cooper at his best is not 
inferior to Scott at his best. But Scott had a more abund- 
ant humor and a wider insight into human nature. 

Like Scott, Cooper was a writer of romance ; that is 
to say, he was an optimist, an idealizer — one who seeks 
to see only the best, and who refuses to see what is bad. 
Scott chose to present only the bright side of chivalry, 
and to make the Middle Ages far pleasanter than they 
could have been in reality. Probably Scott knew that 
the picture he gave of England under Richard the Lion- 
Hearted was misleading ; certainly he knew that he was 
not telling the whole truth. Cooper's red Indians are 
quite as real as Scott's black knights, to say the least. 
Cooper's Indians are true to life, absolutely true to life — 
so far as they go. Cooper told the truth about them — 
but he did not tell the whole truth. Sometimes he put 
forward the exception as the type ; and sometimes he 
neglected some of the red man's ugliest traits. Cooper told 
us that the Indian is cruel as Scott told us that a tourna- 
ment was often fatal ; but he did not convey to us any 
realization of the ingrained barbarity and cruelty which 
was perhaps the chief characteristic of the Indian warrior. 
This side of the red man is kept in the shadow, while his 
bravery, his manliness, his skill, his many noble qualities, 
are dwelt on at length. 

Time may be trusted safely to make a final selection 
from any author's works, however voluminous they may be, 
or however unequal. Cooper died almost exactly in the 



68 AMERICAN LITERATURE • 

middle of tbe nineteenth century ; and already it is the 
'*Spy" and the '* Leatherstocking Tales" and four or five 
of the " Sea Tales " which survive, because they deserve to 
survive, because they were at once new and true when they 
were written, because they remain to-day the best of their 
kind. Cooper's men of the sea, and his men of the forest 
and the plain, are alive now, though other fashions, in fic- 
tion have come and gone. Other novelists have a more 
finished art nowadays, but no one of them all succeeds 
more completely in doing what he tried to do than did 
Cooper at his best. And he did a great service to Ameri- 
can literature by showing how fit for fiction were the 
scenes, the characters, and the history of his native land. 

Questions. — Tell the story of Cooper's early life and training on 
land and on sea. What changes in his way of living followed upon his 
marriage ? 

What circumstances attending upon Cooper's entrance upon a liter- 
ary career show the dependent position of American literature ? 

Describe the first American historical novel. 

Describe the series of fictions of which Natty Bumppo is the hero. 

Declare the circumstances under which the first sea tale w^as written. 

Compare Cooper's relations with the general public with his associa- 
tions in private life. 

Compare Cooper with Scott. 

What were Cooper's great services to literature ? 

Note. — There are many editions of Cooper's stories. Tlie best is that con- 
taining introductions by his daughter (Houghton Mifflin, 32 vols.). 

The chief biography is that of T. R. Lounsbury in the American Men of Letters 
series (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see Bryant's Oration; Lowell's " Fable for Critics" (Houghton 
Mifflin) ; Thackeray's " On a Peal of Bells ' ; Paikman's essay in North American 
Review (vol. 74, p. 147) ; Mark Twain's " Cooper's Literary Offences " ; W. C. 
Brownell's essay in "American Prose Masters " (Scribner) ; and Brander Matthews's 
address at the Cooperstown centenary in "Gateways to Literature" (Scribner). 
For a'discussion of " Colonialism in the United States," see H. C. Lodge's '* Studies 
in History" (Houghton Mifflin). 




VI WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 



Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper were 
New Yorkers both by descent and by residence, but William 
Cullen Bryant, who lived at the same time, though a New 
Yorker by residence, was of the purest New England 
descent. Like Benjamin Franklin, the forerunner of 
Irving and Cooper, Bryant left the town of his birth to be- 
come the foremost citizen of a great city. He was born 
in the village of Cummington, in western Massachusetts, 
November 3, 1794, so he was eleven years younger than 
Irving and five years younger than Cooper. He survived 

69 



yo AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Irving nearly twenty years, and died in New York in 1878. 
When he first saw the light, the United States were only 
fifteen in number, and Washington, the first President, was 
still at the head of the little nation. He survived to see the 
celebration of the hundred years of our independence, and 
the admission of the thirty-eighth state. 

That he should have lived to the age of eighty-three is 
the more remarkable, as he had a feeble frame and no great 
stock of strength. Asa young child he was *' puny and very 
delicate in body, and of a delicate nervous organization." 
From the beginning he was forced to save himself in every 
way, and to order his life regularly. 

His father was a country doctor ; and his mother was 
descended from John Alden and his wife Priscilla, whose 
courtship has been told in verse by Longfellow, another 
of their descendants. Bryant learned Latin from Vergil's 
**Aeneid" and Greek from the Greek Testament. He 
began to make verses very early, and when scarce ten 
years old, so one of his biographers tells us, he '* received 
a ninepenny coin from his grandfather for a rimed version 
of the first chapter of the book of Job." Even when he 
was but a little boy he wished to be a poet. 

In the fall of 18 10, Bryant, then not quite sixteen, en- 
tered the sophomore class at Williams College. At the end 
of the collegiate year he asked for and received an honor- 
able dismissal from Williams, intending to enter the junior 
class at Yale. But his father could not afford to support 
him at New Haven, and to his lasting regret the poet was 
deprived of the profit of a full college course. He began 
the study of law ; and to law his attention was given for more 
than ten years. He did not like the law, and he gave it up 
at the first opportunity ; but while it was his calling he did 
his work loyally and thoroughly. 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 71 

The North American Review was founded in 181 5 by 
a little group of Bostonians, of whom Richard Henry 
Dana was one ; it was an imitation of the British reviews 
of that time. To this periodical certain of Bryant's poems 
were sent ; and when one of these was read aloud at a 
meeting of the editors, Dana smiled and said, ''You have 
been imposed upon. No one on this side of the Atlantic 
is capable of writing such verse." 

When they had assured themselves that they had not 
been imposed upon, the editors published two of the poems 
in the North American Review iox September, 1817. One 
was called *' Thanatopsis," and it had been composed six 
years before, when the poet was not yet eighteen. It was, 
as a critic has well said, *' not only the finest poem which 
had been produced on this continent, but one of the most 
remarkable poems ever produced at such an early age." 
After its original appearance in print, the author re- 
vised it and improved it ; but from the first it was seen 
to be among the foremost moral poems of our language. 
Though the poet might afterward equal it, he could 
never surpass it. In the same number of the Review ap- 
peared also his verses now known as ** Inscription for the 
Entrance to a Wood." In 18 18 the Review pubHshed 
Bryant's. ** Lines to a Waterfowl." Thereafter there was 
no doubt that the English language had gained a new poet. 

He was married in 1820; and two years later he was 
invited to deliver, at Harvard, the Phi Beta Kappa poem, 
which pleased its hearers so much that he yielded to their 
requests, and gathered his scattered verses into a little 
volume. This earlier poetry of Bryant's has for us a 
double interest, that due to its own merit, which is un- 
doubted, and that due to its influence upon other native 
poets in opening their eyes to the life about them. In 



72 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

this prosperous twentieth century it is very hard for us 
to understand how completely American authors de- 
pended upon Great Britain in the first quarter of the 
century. Not only was everything judged by British 
standards — everything was seen through British spec- 
tacles. 

Bryant saw clearly that the flowers and the birds of 
New England were not those of old England; and later 
American poets have profited by his resolute use of 
nature as it is here in the United States. After Bryant's 
first volume of poems appeared, the nightingale became 
as silent in American verse as it had always been in 
American woods. He always kept close watch on na- 
ture : when only twelve years old, he wrote verses about 
the eclipse of 1806. '' Thanatopsis " is imbued with a 
spirit of loving tenderness toward nature. The '' Yellow 
Violet," written in 18 14, is probably the first poem de- 
voted to an actual American flower ; and it reveals anew 
the poet's ability to see for himself what no poet had 
noted before, as in the final line of this stanza, for ex- 
ample : — 

Thy parent sun, who bade thee view 
Pale skies, and chilling moisture sip, 

Has bathed thee in his own bright hue, 
And streaked with jet thy glowing lip. 

In 1825 Bryant gave up the law finally, resolved to earn 
his living by his pen. He removed to New York, where 
he was to reside for the next half century. He was ap- 
pointed editor of the New York Review, to which he con- 
tributed many poems, among them that beginning: — 

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year. 

The Review did not prosper ; but before it died Bryant 
had become an editorial writer on the Evening Post, and in 




73 



74 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

1829, when the editor in chief of the Evening Post died, 
Bryant was promoted to his place. He already owned 
one eighth of the paper, and he was now enabled to in- 
crease his holding to one half. This share he retained 
to his death, and it became increasingly profitable as the 
years went by. 

Bryant gave up law for journalism at a time when 
there was still an old-fashioned primness among literary 
people: it was a time when the law was commonly per- 
sonified as '' Themis," when authors were called the 
''literati," when writing verses was termed ''toying with 
the Muses," and when there were not a few other affecta- 
tions. New York, already marked as the business me- 
tropolis of the country, was also the literary center of the 
Union when Bryant moved to it. And by the authors 
and artists of New York Bryant was made welcome. He 
lectured before the newly organized National Academy of 
Design, and he became a member of the Cooper Club, 
better known as the " Bread and Cheese Lunch." 

Although American literature had thus begun, it was 
still in its infancy. The reading public was very small, 
and the magazines were few and struggling. One could 
hardly earn a living as a man of letters ; to support a 
family by literature was impossible. Irving was a bachelor, 
and Cooper had means of his own. Besides, literature at 
best is better as a staff than it is as a crutch. There is no 
doubt, therefore, that Bryant did well in relying on jour- 
nalism for his bread, although he might hope now and 
again to pay for his butter by literature. The editor, like 
the author, earns his living by his pen, yet there is little 
or no other likeness between them. The author says once 
for all what he has to say, and he says it as best he can ; 
while the journalist, if he says anything once, must repeat 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 



75 



it again and again, since that is his chief method of pro- 
ducing his effect. Then, again, the author tries to find 
subjects of eternal interest, ever fresh and never stale ; 
while the journalist is condemned to the perpetual discus- 
sion of timely topics of present importance. Perhaps it is 
not too much to suggest that the habit of journalism tends 
to unfit a man for literature. 

In journalism, as in authorship, character tells for as 
much as ability ; and upon the newspaper he conducted 
Bryant imposed his own lofty ideals. He held fast to his 
principles, even when they forced him to leave the political 
party with which he had hitherto been acting. But al- 
though as a journalist Bryant took high ground and de- 
fended it firmly, he was never carried away by the fury of 
partisan discussion. In his editorial writings, as in his 
poetry, the tone is full of dignity. Calm in his strength, 
he was both temperate in expressing his opinions and 
good-tempered. He fought fairly and he respected his 
adversary. He was never a snarling critic either of men 
or of measures. He elevated the level of the American 
newspaper, but it was by his practice, not by his preaching 
He was choice in his own use of language, and there was 
in the office of the Evening Post a list of words and 
phrases not permitted in its pages. 

The editorial articles which Bryant wrote for his paper 
day by day for more than fifty years have never been col- 
lected, and of course they never will be, though they are 
a history of the United States during the half century 
which no student of the times can afford to neglect. The 
letters written to the Evening Post, when he was on his 
travels, have many of them been reprinted. In 1850 he 
gathered the best of them into a volume, as the '' Letters 
of a Traveler"; and in 1869 he made a second collection 



76 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

called '* Letters from the East." The interest of these 
two books is due rather to their author than to their own 
merits ; he lacked the ease, the lightness, the familiarity 
which are to be found in the letters of the ideal traveler. 
He was a poet ; and his best work was in verse, not in 
prose. 

Bryant was also a public speaker. Upon a score of 
solemn occasions the poet was the orator of the day; and 
these addresses are preserved in a volume of the collected 
edition of his works. At the death of Cooper, Bryant was 
invited to deliver a memorial oration, in which he paid to 
his departed friend the full measure of laudation, not over- 
praising, but carefully criticizing, and setting the fame of 
the novelist upon firm foundations. More than once he 
was the speaker on great civic occasions when the citizens 
of New York needed a mouthpiece. Yet he was not a 
born orator; he lacked the physical strength, the sweep 
of gesture, the persuasive voice, the contagious enthusiasm, 
the kindling fire, which make up the gift of eloquence. 
His addresses were always written out carefully ; they 
were always prepared with a full appreciation of the de- 
mands of the occasion, and with a full understanding of 
his own limitations ; they were always stately and impres- 
sive, yet were never stiff or labored. 

The fame of the orator, and of the traveler, and of 
the journaHst, perishes swiftly, while that of the poet 
endures. Bryant did not allow his duty to his newspaper 
wholly to absorb his time. To poetry he was devoted his 
whole Hfe long, although the body of his verse is not great. 
In 1 83 1 he published a volume of his poetry containing 
four score more poems than had appeared in the collection 
of ten years before. More than thirty years later, in 1863, 
he issued what may be called the second volume of his 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 



77 



verse, to which he gave the simple title of ** Thirty 
Poems/' Among these later poems were the defiant 
refrain of '^ Not Yet," and the resolute stanzas, *' Our 
Country's Call," written in the dark days at the outbreak 
of the Rebellion and nobly eulogized in Lowell's "On 
Board the Seventy- Six." His later verses were added in 
successive editions of his complete poems. 

In the course of his travels and of his studies he had 
made himself familiar with French and German, Spanish 
and Italian, while he had deepened his knowledge of Greek 
and Latin. In the fall of 1863 he translated the fifth book 
of the ''Odyssey." Encouraged by the way in which it 
was received, he turned to the '' Iliad " and began to trans- 
late passages of that. In the summer of 1866 his wife 
died, and the poet felt her loss keenly ; it unfitted him for 
severe work, and yet made it advisable that he should 
keep occupied. He again turned to Homer; and in 1870 
he published his complete translation of the '' IHad," fol- 
lowing it two years later with a version of the " Odyssey." 
Bryant was successful in giving the impression of ease and 
of elevation, and his version of Homer has generally been 
accepted as among the best of the many recent metrical 
translations. 

Bryant had long passed three score years and ten when 
he finished his task of turning the great Greek poem into 
English verse. He was hale in his old age, exercising 
regularly, eating sparingly, taking great care of himself, 
and retaining full possession of his powers. At the age 
of eighty-four he delivered an address in Central Park at 
the unveiling of the bust of Mazzini, the Itahan patriot. 
The day was hot, and he spoke with shght shelter from 
the sun. After the ceremony he walked across the Park 
to a friend's house, but as he mounted the steps he fell 



78 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



back suddenly. He was taken to his own home, where he 
lingered for a fortnight, dying June 12, 1878. 

Bryant's place in the history of American literature is 
easy to declare : he was a pioneer and leader. He was 
the earliest poet of nature as it is here in the United States, 
seeing it freshly for himself and not repeating at second 
hand what British poets had been saying about nature as 
■1 




Bryant's Home, Roslyn, L.I. 

it is in the British Isles. The love he bore to nature was 
almost a passion, like the love he had for his country. 
His verse is stately and reserved, sometimes perilously 
near to frigidity. Yet there is a lyric swing in the '* Song 
of Marion's Men '' and a singing quality to the '' Planting 
of the Apple Tree." 

It is not fair to suggest that Bryant's muse always sits 
lonely on a chill and lofty peak. No doubt there is often 
an absence of warmth — due perhaps to the constant self- 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 



79 



control which had become second nature. Bryant likened 
George Washington to the frozen Hudson flowing full and 
mighty beneath its shield of ice ; and one could fairly 
apply the figure to the poet himself. There is a stern 
and determined vigor in certain of his stanzas that Wash- 
ington might have enjoyed. Take the famous quatrain 
from the " Battle-Field," for example, — 

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again : 

The eternal years of God are hers ; 
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain 

And dies among his worshipers. 

His hatred of shams and gauds kept his verse simple and 
clear — undefiled by jingling conceits or petty prettinesses ; 
it is sustained nearly always at the same high level. Al- 
though his best poems are not many, he wrote surprisingly 
little that fell below his average. It is said that an old 
young man makes a young old man. Certainly the saying 
was true of Bryant as a poet: he was mature very early 
in life and he kept his freshness to the end. '^Thana- 
topsis " was written when he was young, and the '' Flood 
of Years " when he was old ; and a comparison shows that 
there has been no growth : the thought is as deep in the 
first poem as in the second, and the expression is as free 
and as noble. 



Questions. — Discuss briefly : (i ) Bryant's early acquaintance with 
verse; (2) his career as a student. 

Comment upon Bryant's first four important poems. What double 
interest have these poems for us ? 

What is to be said for and against journalism as a calling for a person 
of literary tastes? What was Bryant's ideal in journalism? 

What portion of his journalistic writing did he care to preserve? 

What is to be said of Bryant as a public speaker? 

What is Bryant's place in the history of American literature ? 



8o 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



What is one criticism most likely to be made upon Bryant's poetry? 
And what can be said in answer to this criticism? 



Note. — The only complete edition of Bryant's works is that published by 
Appleton (4 vols.), who also issue the "Poems" alone (Household edition and 
Cabinet edition). " Sella," with " Thanatopsis " and other poems, are included in 
one number of the Riverside Literature series (Houghton Mifflin). 

There are biographies by Parke Godwin (Appleton. 2 vols.), and by John 
Bigelow in American Men of Letters series (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see Lowell's "Fable for Critics" (Houghton Mifflin); E. C. 
Stedman's " Poets of America" (Houghton Mifflin) ; and W. E. Leonard in the 
" Cambridge History of American Literature " (Putnam). 





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VII EDGAR ALLAN POE 

With scarcely an exception the chief authors of America 
have lived out their allotted threescore years and ten ; 
and their long lives have been happy ; and at last they 
have died surrounded by friends and held in high honor 
by their fellow-countrymen. Franklin and Irving, Bryant 
and Emerson, Longfellow and Lowell, Holmes and Whit- 
tier, all survived to a ripe old age. James Fenimore 
Cooper, although often harassed by petty squabbles due to 
his own touchiness of temper, was completely happy at his 
own fireside ; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, although so much 

8i 



82 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of a recluse by nature as to seem to some almost a mis- 
anthrope, was quite as fortunate in his home life as Cooper 
was. 

The single exception to this remarkable record of pros- 
perous and honorable longevity is Edgar Allan Poe, who 
died young and alone and poor and in ill repute. And yet 
in the eyes of foreigners he is the most gifted of all the 
authors of America ; he is the one to whom the critics of 
Europe would most readily accord the full title of genius. 
At the beginning of the twentieth century Poe is the sole 
man of letters born in the United States whose writings are 
I read eagerly in Great Britain and in France, in Germany, 

in Italy, and in Spain, where Franklin is now but a name 
and where the fame of James Fenimore Cooper, once as 
widely spread, is now slowly fading away. 

And in yet another respect is Poe unlike the other 
American authors of this century; they may be divided 
into two geographical groups — Irving, Cooper, and Bry- 
ant in New York ; and Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, 
Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell in New England. Poe was 
neither a New Yorker nor a New Englander ; he was a 
Southerner both by temperament and by descent. 

That he chanced to be born in Boston — on January 
19, 1809 — was an accident due to the fact that his 
parents happened to be attached to a theatrical company 
then performing there. His father was a son of David 
Poe, a revolutionary patriot of Baltimore. His mother 
was an actress of much skill and of high character. After 
the death of his father his mother joined the company in 
Richmond; and there she died also, before Edgar was 
three years old. 

He was a beautiful and precocious child ; and the wife 
of a Richmond merchant named Allan received him into 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



83 



the family. The boy was thereafter called Edgar Allan 
Poe. His parents had been very poor ; and he was now on 
the footing of an adopted son in the household of a liberal 
man who was well-to-do. He was sent to school, and at 
the age of six he could read and draw and dance. '* It is 
related also," says a biographer, ''that Mr. Allan taught 
the boy to stand up in a chair at dessert and pledge the 
health of the company, which he did with roguish grace," 
and which may have implanted in him then the seeds of 
a fatal desire for strong drink. 

In 1815 the Allans went to England and Edgar was put 
to school in the outskirts of London, where he took part 
in outdoor sports and studied Latin and French. Five 
years later, when the boy was eleven, the family returned 
to Richmond and he was again sent to a good school. 
He began to write verses ; he led in the school debates 
and in the school athletics; but he made no intimate 
friends. Even as a boy he seems to have been self-willed, 
**proud of his powers and fond of their successful display." 
One of his schoolboy feats at the age of sixteen was to 
swim from Richmond to Warwick, a. distance of five or 
six miles. After he left school he studied for a while 
under excellent tutors ; and then at the age of seventeen 
he matriculated at the University of Virginia, where he re- 
mained a little longer than a year. 

His scholarship was praised while he was there, and he 
was on good terms with. the authorities. But his character 
was declaring itself ; he was sometimes solitary and re- 
served ; and sometimes he drank to excess and played 
cards beyond his means. At the close of the session Mr. 
Allan refused to pay these gambling debts and took Poe 
away from the university, giving him a desk in the count- 
ing room at Richmond. Perhaps Poe felt himself unfitted 



84 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

for business, and perhaps its restraints were irksome. At 
all events he soon broke away finally. 

In May, 1827 — being again in Boston — he enlisted 
in the United States Army, under the name of Edgar A. 
Perry, giving his age as twenty-two (when he was really 
only eighteen). He served in the artillery for nearly two 
years, first in the harbor of Boston, then at Fort Moultrie 
near Charleston, and finally at Fortress Monroe. He 
seems to have discharged his duties to the satisfaction of 
his officers, and he was even promoted to be Sergeant 
Major. After the death of Mrs. Allan, he was reconciled 
with her husband, who procured Edgar's honorable dis- 
charge from the army and afterwards got him an appoint- 
ment as a cadet at West Point. 

He entered the Military Academy in July, 1830, being 
then twenty-one but declaring himself to be only nineteen. 
He was shy and reserved with his fellow-cadets. His 
French was fluent and he had an aptitude for mathematics, 
so that the hard work of the education the government 
gives its officers was easy for him. But he showed a 
gross contempt for his military duties ; and probably the 
service was not alluring to him. 

Shortly after he entered West Point Mr. Allan married 
again ; and Poe knew that he could no longer hope to 
inherit any portion of that gentleman's fortune. Having 
the ample confidence of youthful ability, he resolved to 
face the world for himself. By absence from roll call and 
guard duty and by disobedience to the orders of the officer 
of the day, he made certain his dismissal after trial by court- 
martial. And in March, 1831, being then twenty-two years 
old, he left West Point to begin the battle of life alone. 

He had arranged with his fellow-cadets to subscribe for 
a volume of his poetry. Already in Boston in 1827 he 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



85 



had published a thin Httle book containing "Tamerlane 
and Other Poems," not more immature than juvenile verses 
usually are. Two years later in Baltimore he had pub- 
lished what was really an enlargement of this first venture, 
'^Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems." The collec- 
tion published in New York in 1831 contained revised ver- 
sions of these earlier metrical essays, with the addition of 
his later verses ; it was called simply " Poems " and it was 
dedicated to the cadets of the Military Academy. Al- 
though Poe probably made a little money by the subscrip- 
tions to this book, it failed to make any deep impression 
on the public. 

The next four years Were for Poe a period of hard strug- 
gle and bitter poverty. He began to write short-stories ; 
and one of these, a tale of striking vigor and novelty, the 
**MS. found in a Bottle," won him a hundred-dollar prize 
offered by a newspaper for the best brief fiction sent to it. 
But he could not find a publisher willing to issue the vol- 
ume of tales of which this was one. There were times 
when he was in want of the absolute necessities of life — 
when he was insufficiently clothed and when he lacked 
food itself. But he had friends who encouraged him and 
helped him in many ways. 

At last, in 1835, ^^^^ ^^ these friends got him the post of 
assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a new 
monthly review just started in Richmond. For a position 
of this character he immediately showed himself to be re- 
markably well fitted ; and under his control the Messeiiger 
promptly became the leading literary periodical of the 
South. Poe printed in it his own poems and short-stories, 
and thus began to make himself known as an imaginative 
writer of strange originality and power. As a critic also 
he revealed unexpected strength ; he had fixed principles 



86 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of literary art and he applied these principles fairly and 
fearlessly to the writings of the time. Indeed, in this 
earlier part of Poe's career as an author he was known 
rather as a critic than as a poet or as a romancer. 

Having an assured income from the Southern Literary 
Messenger sufficient for his support, he married his cousin, 
Virginia Clemm. This was in May, 1836, and he was then 
twenty-seven years old ; the bride was barely fourteen. 
He made a tender and a devoted husband. The future now 
seemed bright before him : he had a loving wife and loyal 
friends ; he had a comfortable home and congenial work; 
he was rapidly making himself known as an author from 
whom much might be expected. Then suddenly he let his 
fortune slip through his hands ; he yielded again to the 
temptation of drink ; and a few months after his marriage 
he lost his place on the Messenger. 

The record of the thirteen remaining years of Poe's life 
is one long sequence of similar opportunities wasted in like 
manner. He had many friends always willing to help him 
along ; and his ability as an editor was indisputable. But 
whatever the position he undertook to fill, and however 
firmly he might set about his duties, the fatal weakness al- 
ways reappeared sooner or later. As the years passed over 
him, the temptation became more and more difficult to 
resist. When he was sober he was hard working, faithful 
to his duties, and courteous to all. But toward the end 
of his life the periods of sobriety were briefer, as his will 
was enfeebled by constant yielding. 

After leaving Richmond Poe published, in 1838, the 
"Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," a fictitious story of 
Antarctic adventure, made real by the constant descrip- 
tion of unimportant detail, somewhat in the manner of 
'* Robinson Crusoe." 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 87 

In 1840 he succeeded in finding a publisher for the 
"Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque," the most 
original collection of short-stories written by any American 
author, with the sole exception of the volume of ''Twice- 
Told Tales" which Hawthorne had sent forth from his 
obscurity three years before. It is to be recorded that 
Poe was one of the first to recognize the genius of Haw- 
thorne. The story-teller of the South swiftly discovered 
in the romancer of the North certain of the rare qualities 
which he knew himself to possess and which he ardently 
admired — invention, and imagination, and a mastery of 
the weird and the mysterious. 

While there was in the ''Tales of the Grotesque and the 
Arabesque" a certain Southern aflfluence and luxuriance, 
and in the "Twice-Told Tales" a certain Northern severity 
and restraint, both authors showed in these books that they 
had not only the native gift of story-telling but also that 
they had acquired the art of narrative. Any tale of theirs, 
twice-told, or grotesque and arabesque, had always unity 
of conception, adroit perspective, and just proportion. 

Perhaps the knowledge that Hawthorne had had a post 
in the Boston customhouse suggested to Poe that he 
should also try to secure a place in the government ser- 
vice. This was during his six years' residence in Phila- 
delphia after he left Richmond. He failed to get the 
appointment he sought. But fortune favored him again 
and again, and he had other places. He acted as editor 
of one magazine after another, always increasing its cir- 
culation by his skill and his activity, and always losing his 
position at last either because he quarreled with the pro- 
prietor or because he lapsed again into his old habits and 
then neglected his duties. The fidelity with which Poe 
did his allotted work and the courtesy he showed toward 




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90 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

his employers during the periods when he retained his 
self-contro! were in marked contrast with his character- 
istics when he had yielded to temptation, for then he was 
neglectful, touchy, and suspicious. 

As a writer his reputation steadily rose during his stay 
in Philadelphia. In 1841 he published in a magazine the 
first detective-story ever written, the *' Murders in the 
Rue Morgue'*; and two years later he won another hun- 
dred-dollar prize with a second tale of the same type, the 
** Gold Bug." Two other stories of hidden secrets skillfully 
unraveled are his '' Mystery of Marie Roget " and the '* Pur- 
loined Letter." Just as Washington Irving had written 
the first American local short-story in *' Rip Van Winkle,'* 
and just as James Fenimore Cooper had written the first 
sea tale in the " Pilot," so Poe in like manner invented 
the detective-story. He has had numberless imitators in 
this department of fiction ; he has had no real rivals. In 
ingenuity, in variety, in plausibility, in sustained interest 
and in vigorous logic, the '* Murders in the Rue Morgue" 
and the *'Gold Bug" are unsurpassable masterpieces. 

After a stay of six years in Philadelphia Poe moved in 
1844 to New York, where his residence was for the few 
remaining years of his life. He had long cherished the 
hope of starting a monthly magazine of his own, but the 
project never came to anything, although it always re- 
mained the center of Poe's aspirations. He found editorial 
positions first on one and then on another literary journal 
in New York, breaking off his connection with them 
suddenly as was his custom. 

His criticisms of his contemporaries were now far 
sharper than they had been when he first wrote ; and they 
were less honest. As a critic Poe's influence had hitherto 
been excellent in the main, for he had a better equipment 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



91 



and a keener insight than any other newspaper reviewer of 
the time ; and he had lofty ideals of literary art. But as 
he grew older his opinions seem to have narrowed. He 
had no reverence for Homer or Shakspere or Milton ; he 
regarded Keats and Shelley and Coleridge *'and a few 
others of like expression ... as the sole poets.'' 

Having these one-sided views, he was often violent and 
intolerant in setting them forth. And he allowed his liking 
for the person of an author to influence his published opin- 
ion of that author's works. He praised his friends unduly; 
and he w^as bitter in his attack on those whom he held to 
be his enemies. Even the gentle Longfellow was unfairly 
held up to scorn as a poet who pilfered from many pred- 
ecessors. One writer whose works he criticised sharply, 
retorted with an attack so personal that Poe brought suit 
for libel and recovered damages. 

Yet at this time Poe's own reputation as a poet had just 
been established firmly by the publication of the ''Raven " 
— perhaps the most widely known poem written by any 
American to this day. It appeared in a magazine early 
in 1845 and was instantly copied into the leading news- 
papers of the United States. It achieved an immediate 
popularity, which continues undiminished to the present 
time. Its reception was so cordial that toward the close 
of the year Poe gathered up his other verses, revising 
them scrupulously as was his wont, and sent forth a vol- 
ume called the '' Raven and Other Poems." Hitherto 
Poe had been known to the public as a critic chiefly, 
and also as a writer of short- stories ; thereafter he was 
accepted as a poet. 

In the preface to this collection of his verses, Poe 
declared that poetry had been to him '* not a purpose, but a 
passion." By long study he had made himself a master of 



92 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



the technic of verse, and he combined with extraordinary- 
skill all the effects to be derived from lilting rhythm, intri- 
cate rime, artful repetition, and an aptly chosen refrain. 
He bent words to his bidding, and he made his verse so 
melodious that it had almost the charm of music. 

That his scheme of poetry was highly artificial, that the 
themes of his poems were vague and insubstantial, and that 
his stanzas do not stimulate thought — these things may 
be admitted without disadvantage. What the reader does 
find in Poe's poetry is the suggestion of departed but 
imperishable beauty, and the lingering grace and fascina- 
tion of haunting melancholy. His verses throb with an 
inexpressible magic and glow with intangible fantasy. 
His poems have no other purpose ; they convey no moral ; 
they echo no call to duty ; they celebrate beauty only — 
beauty immaterial and evanescent; they are their own 
excuse for being. 

In 1846 he moved to a tiny little cottage at Fordham 
in the outskirts of New York. His wife was dying, and 
they were in bitter want. He lacked even bedclothes to 
wrap up the enfeebled woman he loved, and she lay in bed 
covered with his overcoat. Toward the end of the year a 
public appeal was made in the newspapers, stating that the 
family of the poet needed immediate help ; and as a result, 
their necessities were promptly relieved. Poe's ''natural 
pride impelled him to shrink from public charity even at 
the cost of truth in denying those necessities which were 
but too real." His wife sank lower and lower day by day, 
and early in 1847 she died. Poe himself was also ill ; and 
again a subscription on his behalf was taken up in New 
York. 

For a while he lived in retirement, slowly regaining his 
strength. It was about this time that he wrote the *' Bells,'' 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



93 



one of the most sonorously melodious of his poems, second 
in popularity only to the '* Raven." He also elaborated 
a pseudo-scientific rhapsody, which he called ** Eureka." 
Before publishing this he delivered part of it as a lecture. 
He had appeared on the lecture platform more than once 
already in Philadelphia and in Boston. He was a pic- 
turesque and striking speaker ; and it is not easy to see 




Poe's Cottage, Fordham. N.Y. 



why he did not earlier turn his attention to lecturing as a 
means of pushing his fortunes. 

Even before the death of his wife he seems to have 
allowed himself to be flattered by foolish women, whose 
now forgotten verses he belauded extravagantly. To one 
or another of these he went for sympathy, although appar- 



94 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

ently unable to decide definitely which of them he pre- 
ferred. He was even engaged to be married to a lady in 
Providence, who had to break off the match because he did 
not keep his word to her to give up drink. Then he pro- 
posed to a lady in Richmond and, so it seems, was accepted. 

Toward the end of September, two years after his wife's 
death, he left Richmond to arrange for his final removal 
from New York. Four or five days later he was found in 
Baltimore in the last stages of delirium. He was admitted 
to a hospital, and there, on Sunday, October 9, 1849, ^^ 
died. His relatives took charge of his funeral and he was 
buried the next day. 

Thus came to an untimely end the unfortunate genius 
who was born in the same year as Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
and who died miserably forty years and more before the 
close of Holmes's dignified and honorable career. He 
had great gifts, perhaps greater than those of any other 
American poet, but he knew not how to husband them. 
He had many chances, but he threw them away, one by 
one. Fortune favored him again and again, but he made 
shipwreck of his fate. He won many friends to no pur- 
pose, for their unwearied efforts were unavailing to save 
him from the consequences of his own weakness of will. 
His misfortunes were due to his own failings ; and if he 
was unhappy, it was entirely his own fault. He was, as 
Lowell said in Poe's lifetime, ** wholly lacking in that ele- 
ment of manhood which for want of a better name we 
call character ; it is something quite distinct from genius 
— though all great geniuses are endowed with it." 



Questions. — Enlarge upon two respects in which Poe is strikingly 
unlike the other great American writers of the nineteenth century. 
Trace his career to his expulsion from West Point. 



EDGAR ALLAN POE 



95 



Compare Poe's literary ability, as it was revealed by his first impor- 
•tant volume, with that of Hawthorne, as this was revealed in the latter^s 
corresponding work. 

Discuss Poe's success in a Hne of fiction in which he was the 
pioneer. 

What changes in Poe^s disposition and manner began to be evident 
after his removal to what was to be his home for the few remaining 
years of his life ? 

What characteristics of Poe's genius at about the same time opened 
for him a new literary career ? 

What were the chief events of the last three years of Poe's life ? 

How does Lowell's estimate of Poe's character agree with your own ? 



Note. — For complete editions of Foe's works, see Stedman and Woodberry 
(Scribner, lo vols.) and J. A. Harrison (Crowell, ii vols.). The most carefully 
annotated single volume edition of the " Poems " is that of Killis Campbell (Ginn). 

The best biography is G. E. Woodberry 's in the American Men of Letters 
series (Houghton Mififlin). 

The best criticism of Poe is in Stedman's "Poets of America" (Houghton 
Mifflin). Note also the characterization of Poe in I^owell's " Fable for Critics" 
(Houghton Mifflin) ; in T. W. Higginson's " Short Studies of American Authors " 
(Longmans) ; in A. Lang's preface to his edition of Poe's poems (Mosher) ; and 
in W. C. Brownell's " American Prose Masters " (Scribner). Attention may also 
be called to Brander Matthews's essays, "Poe and the Detective Story" in " In- 
quiries and Opinions " (Scribner), and" Poe's Cosmopolitan Fame " in " Gateways 
to Literature" (Scribner). 




VIII RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



Although Franklin and Bryant were born in New 
England, they left it in early life — Franklin for Philadel- 
phia, and Bryant for New York, where he found Irving 
and Cooper. The earliest of the leaders of American 
literature to be born in New England, to live there, and to 
die there, was Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

He is the foremost representative of the powerful influ- 
ence which New England has exerted on American life 
and on American literature. The fathers of Franklin and 
of Irving were newcomers ; the ancestors of Emerson had 

96 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 97 

been settled in New England for five generations. They 
had been ministers of the gospel, one after another ; and 
Emerson's grandfather belonged also to the church mili- 
tant, urging on his parishioners to the fight at Concord 
Bridge in 1775, and dying in 1776 from a fever caught 
while on his way to join the troops at Ticonderoga. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born May 25, 1803, in 
Boston, not far from the birthplace of Franklin. His 
father was a clergyman, who had recently founded what 
is now the library of the Boston Athenaeum. Books, 
rather than the usual boyish sports, were the delight 
of the son. He rarely played, and never owned a sled. 
In the austere New England life of the time there was 
little leisure for mere amusement. 

Emerson's father died before the boy was eight years 
old, and thereafter the child had to help his mother, who 
took boarders and tried hard to give her sons an education 
such as their father's. Emerson entered the Latin School 
in 181 3, and one day the next year, when there was a 
rumor that the British were going to send a fleet to Boston 
Harbor, he went with the rest of the boys to help build 
earthworks on one of the islands. About this time, also, 
he began to rime, celebrating in juvenile verse the victories 
of the young American navy. 

In August, 18 1 7, Emerson entered Harvard College, 
obtaining the appointment of *' President's Freshman," a 
student who received his lodgings free in return for carry- 
ing official messages. He served also as waiter at the 
college commons, and so saved three fourths the cost of 
his board. Later in his college course he acted as tutor 
to younger pupils. He seems to have impressed his 
instructors as a youth of remarkable ability ; but he was 
not a diligent student. 



98 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In those days Harvard was not a university ; it was not 
even a college ; it was little more than a high school where 
boys recited their lessons. Emerson was only eighteen 
when he was graduated, feeling that the regular course 
of studies had done little for him, and having therefore 
strayed out of the beaten path to browse for himself 
among the books in the library. He was popular with 
the best of his classmates, and at graduation he was class 
poet. 

Whatever may have been the value of a college educa- 
tion in those days, Emerson was the earliest of the little 
group of the founders of American literature to go through 
college. Franklin, having to work for his living from early 
boyhood, had no time ; Irving, after preparing for Colum- 
bia, threw his chance away ; Cooper was expelled from 
Yale ; and Bryant was so dissatisfied with Williams that 
he left it after a single year. But the authors who came 
after Emerson made sure of the best education that this 
country could afford them. Hawthorne and Longfellow 
were graduated from Bowdoin, while from Emerson's col- 
lege, Harvard, were to come Holmes and Lowell, Thorcau 
and Parkman. 

When he graduated, Emerson's ambition was to be a 
professor of rhetoric ; but such a position was never 
offered to him. He taught school for a while in Boston, 
earning money to pay his debts and to help his mother. 
Then he entered the Divinity School at Harvard, and, in 
October, 1826, he was ''approbated to preach," deliv^ering 
his first sermon a few days later. For the sake of his 
health he spent that winter in Florida, at St. Augustine. 
On his return he lived chiefly in Cambridge, preaching 
here and there; and in the spring of 1829 he became the 
minister of the old North Church in Boston. In Septem- 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 99 

ber he married Miss Ellen Tucker, but he lost his wife 
soon after the marriage. Not long after, a change in his 
views as to religious rites and duties made him unwilling 
to remain in the ministry, and in 1832 he resigned his 
charge. 

On Christmas day of that year he sailed for Europe in 
a small brig bound for Malta, whence he went over into 
Italy, and thence to France and Great Britain, and met the 
essayist Carlyle and the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. 
With Carlyle Emerson formed a lasting friendship, which 
seems extraordinary, for few men were less akin in their 
manners or in their views of life. In low, clear tones the 
gentle American spoke to the soul of man, while the burly 
Scotch humorist was forever scolding and shrieking. Car- 
lyle was proudly scornful and harshly indignant, while 
Emerson was kindly, tolerant, and forbearing ; but differ- 
ent as were their attitudes, their aims were not so unlike, 
since Emerson loved good and Carlyle hated evil ; and 
their friendship endured till death. 

Toward the end of 1833 Emerson came back to Amer- 
ica, pleased that in Europe he had met the men he most 
wished to see. A few months after his return he settled 
in Concord, to reside there for the rest of his life. In 
1835 he married Miss Lidian Jackson, with whom he was 
to live happily for nearly half a century. 

Emerson was now past thirty. He was not yet known 
as an author, and he did not look to authorship for his 
living ; indeed, in the United States authorship could then 
give but a precarious livelihood. Besides, he preferred to 
teach by word of mouth. He still preached occasionally, 
and he lectured frequently. His earliest addresses seem 
to have been on scientific subjects, and he talked to his 
townsmen also about his travels in Europe, which was 



lOO 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



then distant at least a month's sail, and which few Ameri- 
cans could hope to visit. For many years he delivered in 
Boston, nearly every winter, long courses of lectures, not 
reported or printed, but containing much that the author 
repeated in the essays he was to publish afterward. 

At last, in 1836, he put forth his first book, "Nature, '' 
and the next year he delivered an oration on '* The Ameri- 




Emerson's Residence, Concord. Mass. 



can Scholar." Hitherto little had happened to him except 
the commonplaces of existence ; thereafter, though his life 
remained tranquil, he was known to the world at large. He 
was greeted as are all who declare a new doctrine ; wel- 
comed by some, abused by many, misunderstood by most. 
Proclaiming the value of self-reliance, Emerson denounced 
man's slavery to his own worldly prosperity, and set forth 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON lOI 

at once the duty and the pleasure of the plain living which 
permits high thinking. '' Why should you renounce your 
right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, " he asked, 
''"for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? " 

He asserted the virtue of manual labor. Looking bravely 
toward the future, he bade his hearers break the bonds of 
the past. He told them to study themselves, since all the 
real good or evil that can befall must come from them- 
selves. At the heart of Emerson's doctrine there was 
always a sturdy and wholesome Americanism. 

He was never self-assertive. He never put himself 
forward ; and yet from that time on there was no denying 
his leadership of the intellectual advance of the United 
. States. The most enlightened spirits of New England 
gathered about him ; and he found himself in the center of 
the vague movement known as ''Transcendentalism." For 
all their hardness, the New Englanders are an imaginative 
race ; and Transcendentalism is but one of the waves of 
spiritual sentiment which have swept over them. Emer- 
son himself had never a hint of eccentricity. His judg- 
ment was always sane and calm. He edited for a while 
the Dial, a magazine for which the Transcendentalists 
wrote, and which existed from 1840 to 1844. But he took 
no part in an experiment of communal life undertaken by 
a group of Transcendentalists at Brook Farm from 1841 
to 1847. Among those who did join this community 
where all were to share in the labor of the field and of the 
household were Nathaniel Hawthorne and George William 
Curtis. 

In 1 841 Emerson published the first volume of his 
" Essays " ; and he sent forth a second series in 1844. In 
his hands the essay returns almost to the form of Mon- 
taigne and Bacon ; it is weighty and witty ; but it is not 



i02 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

SO light as it was with Addison and Steele, with Gold- 
smith and Irving. He indulged in fancies sometimes, and 
he strove to take his readers by surprise, to startle them, 
and so to arouse them to the true view of life. Nearly all 
his essays had been lectures, and every paragraph had 
been tested by its effect upon an audience. Thus the 
weak phrases were discarded one by one, until at last 
every sentence, polished by wear, rounded to a perfect 
sphere, went to the mark with unerring certainty. 

To Emerson an essay was rather a collection of single 
sayings than a harmonious whole. He was keen-eyed and 
clear-sighted enough to understand his own shortcomings, 
and he once said that every sentence of his was an *' infi- 
nitely repellent particle." His thoughts did not form a 
glittering chain ; they were not even loosely linked to- 
gether. They lay side by side like unset gems in a box. 
Emerson was rather a poet with moments of insight than 
a systematic philosopher. The lack of structure in his 
essays was, in a measure, due also to the way they were 
written. 

It was Emerson's practice to set down in his journal his 
detached thoughts as soon as they had taken shape. 
Whenever he had a lecture to prepare, he selected from his 
journal those sentences which seemed to bear on the sub- 
ject of his discourse, adding whatever other illustrations 
or anecdotes suggested themselves to him at the moment. 
''In writuig my thoughts," he declared, ''I seek no order, 
or harmony, or results. I am not careful to see how they 
comport with other thoughts and other words — I trust them 
for that — any more than how any one minute of the year 
is related to any other remote minute which yet I know is 
so related. The thoughts and the minutes obey their own 
magnetisms, and will certainly reveal themselves in time/' 



I 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 103 

Emerson's first volume of " Poems " was published in 
1846. Ten years before he had written the hymn sung at 
the completion of the monument commemorating Con- 
cord fight : — 

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, 
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled. 

Here once the embattled farmers stood. 
And fired the shot heard round the world. 

This is one of the best, and one of the best known, of 
the poems of American patriotism. But Emerson cared 
too little for form often to write so perfect a poem. The 
bonds of rime and meter irked him and he broke them 
willfully. Now and again he happened on a quatrain than 
which nothing can be more beautiful : — 

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 

Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
But it carves the bow of beauty there. 

And the ripples in rimes the oar forsake. 

Following Bryant, Emerson put into his verse nature 
as he saw it about him — the life of American woods and 
fields. No second-hand nightingale sang in his verses ; 
he took pleasure in riming the "Humble-bee" and the 
"Titmouse," and in singing the streams and the hills of New 
England. Herein there was no lack of elevation. The 
spirit of the true poet Emerson had abundantly ; indeed, 
there are those now who call him a poet rather than a 
philosopher. However careless his verse making — and it 
was sometimes very slovenly — the best of his stanzas are 
strong and bracing ; they lift up the heart of man. 

One of Emerson's poems most richly laden with emotion 
and experience is the "Threnody," which he wrote after 
the death of his first-born. He was a fond father; and his 



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Io6 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

home life was beautiful, like that of nearly all the foremost 
American authors. He liked children, and they liked him. 
He understood them, entering into their feelings as easily 
as he entered into their sports. In his own family, disci- 
pline — never neglected — was enforced by the gentlest 
methods; and he had unbounded interest in the details of 
the school life of his own children, getting them to talk to 
him as freely as they did to their comrades. This was but 
an example of his willingness always to put himself in the 
place of others and to try to see things from their point of 
view. An instance of this sympathetic faculty, and of his 
abiding simplicity, was his comment on the minister who 
went up to the pulpit after Emerson had lectured, and who 
prayed that they might be delivered from ever again hear- 
ing such ** transcendental nonsense." Emerson listened 
to this, and remarked quietly, '' He seems a very conscien- 
tious, plain-spoken man." 

In 1847 Emerson made a second voyage to Europe, sail- 
ing in October and coming home in July of the following 
year. The most of the time he spent in England, lectur- 
ing often, meeting the most distinguished men and women 
of Great Britain, studying matters and men in the little 
island. In the summer he crossed the Channel to France, 
and saw Paris in the heat of the revolution of 1848. After 
his return to America he resumed his lecturing, pushing as 
far west as the Mississippi. 

Certain of the lectures prepared for delivery in England 
supplied the material for his next book — ''Representa- 
tive Men" — published in 1850. Only two of Emerson's 
books have any singleness of scheme, and this is one of 
them. He discusses first the uses of great men, and 
then he considers in turn Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, 
Shakspere, Napoleon, and Goethe — great men, all of 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 107 

them, interesting in themselves and doubly interesting as 
Emerson reflects their images in his clear mirror. It is 
instructive to contrast Emerson's hopeful and helpful treat- 
ment of these ''Representative Men " with Carlyle's doleful 
and robustious writing upon the kindred topic of ''Heroes 
and Hero Worship." 

The observations Emerson had made of English life 
during his two visits had been used in various lectures, 
and from these he made a book, published in 1856, under 
the title of "English Traits." For close argument he 
had no fitness and no liking, but this volume has more 
logical sequence than any other of his. It may be said 
almost to have a plan. It opens with a narrative of his 
first voyage to England, and it contains a study of the 
character of the British. It is perhaps the keenest book 
ever written about a great people by a foreigner. 

Emerson had a singularly keen sense of the ridiculous, 
he had an uncommon share of common sense, and he had 
a marvelous insight into humanity ; and it is therefore the 
highest possible testimony to the substantial merits of the 
British that they stood so well the ordeal of his exami- 
nation. He was too sturdy an American to be taken 
in by the glamour of the aristocratic arrangement of their 
society;, he saw clearly the weakness of the British sys- 
tem, but he was never hostile, and never patronizing ; he 
was always ready to praise boldly. 

The spirit of the book can be shown by the extract from 
a letter he wrote to a friend in America just before his 
return : " I leave England with increased respect for the 
Englishman, . . . the more generous that I have no sym- 
pathy for him." Emerson expressed his admiration heart- 
ily, but he rejoiced always that he lived in a society free 
from the traditions of feudalism. 



I08 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

In his own country he was a good citizen, taking part 
in town meeting, and doing his share of town work — even 
accepting his election as a hog-reeve of Concord. Declar- 
ing always the duty and the dignity of labor, he detested 
the system of slavery under which white men were sup- 
ported by the toil of black men. He did not join the 
abolitionists, but his voice was strong on the side of free- 
dom. He spoke out plainly during the strife in Kansas, 
and again after the hanging of John Brown. Yet he was 
like Goethe in finding patriotism too narrow for him: he 
looked forward and he foresaw the Brotherhood of Man. 
But no intensely national poet, no Hugo, no Tennyson, 
was more stimulating to his country. He it was who had 
edged the resolve of the American people when the hour 
came for stern battle. Lowell said that to Emerson more 
than to all other causes ''the young martyrs of our Civil 
War owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism 
that is so touching in every record of their lives." 

When the war came at last, Emerson was unfailingly 
hopeful. He delivered an address on the Emancipation 
Proclamation, declaring the young happy in that they then 
found the pestilence of slavery cleansed out of the earth. 
On New Year's Day, 1863, he read his noble ''Boston 
Hymn/* with its rough and resonant verses ; and in the 
same year he wrote the "Voluntaries," wherein we find 
this lofty and inspiring quatrain : — 

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man. 
When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 

The youth replies, I can. 

And at the meeting held at Concord in memory of 
Abraham Lincoln, he made a short address in which he 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



109 



set forth the character of the fallen leader with the utmost 
sympathy and the clearest insight. 

A collection of Emerson's later essays had been pub- 
lished in i860 under the title of the first of them, the 
"Conduct of Life" ; and in 1870 another collection followed, 
also named after the opening paper, '* Society and Soli- 
tude." There can be found in these volumes the same 
wit and paradox, the same felicity of phrase, the same 
beauty of thought, the same elevation of spirit, that we find 
in his earlier volumes. 

Emerson grew but little as he became older ; he was 
at the end very much what he was at the beginning. He 
admitted his own ''incapacity for methodical writing." 
However inspiring, every sentence stands by itself ; the 
paragraphs might be rearranged almost at random with- 
out loss to the essential value of the essays. Emerson 
made no effort to formulate his doctrine ; he had no 
compact system of philosophy. Perhaps he was not a 
philosopher in the strict sense of the word ; but rather a 
maker of golden sayings, full of vital suggestion, to help men 
to be themselves and to make the utmost of themselves. 

For years Emerson had extended his winter lecturing 
tours as far west as the Mississippi; and in 1871 he ac- 
cepted the invitation of a friend to visit California, bearing 
the fatigue of the long journey with unwearied cheerful- 
ness. Toward the end of 1872 he sailed for Europe, on 
a third visit to the Old World. In England and France 
and Italy he met again his friends of former years, and 
he wandered on as far as Egypt, where he had never 
been before. He was back again in Concord the next 
spring, and his return home was marked by an outpour- 
ing of all his townsmen to welcome him among them 
once more. 



no AMERICAN LITERATURE 

For several years Emerson had written but little, although 
he continued now and then to draw out new essays and 
make addresses from the store of lectures he had by 
him. Thus in 1870 he had given a course of university 
lectures at Harvard on the *' Natural History of the 
Intellect," and in 1878 he read a lecture on the '* Fortune 
of the Republic," written and already delivered in war 
time fifteen years before. And in 1875 Y^^ another col- 
lection of his essays was published under the title of the 
first paper, '* Letters and Social Aims." This volume 
had been prepared for the press by an old friend, for 
Emerson's powers were beginning to fail. He retained 
possession of his faculties to the last ; but though his mind 
was clear, he had increasing difficulty in recalling the 
words to express his ideas. He forgot not only proper 
names, but even the names of common things, while keep- 
ing the power of describing them in the words he had left. 
So, when he wanted to say ''umbrella" once, and was 
unable to recall the name, he said, '' I can't tell its name, 
but I can tell its history. Strangers take it away." Emer- 
son looked calmly forward to death, and it came when he 
was nearly seventy-nine years of age, on April 27, 1882. 

Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston almost a century 
before Ralph Waldo Emerson was born there, lived long 
enough to see the straggling colonies with their scant four 
hundred thousand settlers grow into a vigorous young 
nation of four million inhabitants. Emerson, born only 
thirteen years after Franklin's death, lived long enough to 
see the United States increase to thirty-eight, and a popu- 
lation of five and a half millions expand to a population of 
fifty millions. He survived to behold a little nation grow 
to be a mighty people, able to fight a righteous war with- 
out flinching. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON III 

Different as they are, Franklin and Emerson are both 
typical Americans — taken together they give us the two 
sides of the American character. Franklin stands for the 
real, and Emerson for the ideal. Franklin represents the 
prose of American life, and Emerson the poetry. Frank- 
lin's power is limited by the bounds of common sense, 
while Emerson's appeal is to the wider imagination. 
Where Emerson advises you to '' hitch your wagon to a 
star," Franklin is ready with an improved axle-grease for 
the wheels. Franklin declares that honesty is the best 
policy ; and Emerson insists on honesty as the only means 
whereby a man may be free to undertake higher things. 
Self-reliance was at the core of the doctrine of each of 
them, but one urged self-help in the material world and 
the other in the spiritual. Hopeful they were, both of 
them, and kindly, and shrewd ; and in the making of the 
American people, in the training and in the guiding of this 
immense population, no two men have done more than 
these two sons of New Eno;land. 



Questions. — Compare the antecedents of Emerson with those of 
several earlier American authors. 

Speak of Emerson's boyhood and student days, and of his choice of 
a profession. 

How did the year 1833 influence Emerson^s later life? 

How did Emerson become the leader of advanced thought in 
America ? 

What may be said of Emerson as an essayist? And as a poet? 

Show how Emerson, in two books that grew out of his second visit 
to Europe, displayed the breadth of his sympathies. 

Discuss the quality of Emerson's patriotism. 

What evidence do you find in Emerson's later books to show the 
early maturing of his mind ? 

Describe the last years of Emerson's life. 

Compare Emerson and Franklin as typical Americans. 



112 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Note. — The only complete edition of Emerson's works is that published by 
Houghton Mifflifi (i2 vols.). The poems are contained in one volume of the 
Household Edition. There are now cheap editions of certain of the earlier vol- 
umes of essays. "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," and " Compensa- 
tion " are included in a single volume ^American Book Company). The " For- 
tune of the Repubhc and other American Addresses," including "The American 
Scholar," forms one number of the Riverside Literature series (Houghton Mififiin). 

There are biographies by J. Elliot Cabot (Houghton Mifflin), by Richard 
Garnett (Scribner), by Alexander Ireland, by E. W. Emerson (Houghton Mifflin), 
by O. W. Holmes in the American Men of Letters series (Houghton Mifflin), 
and by G. E. Woodberry in the English Men of Letters, American series 
(Macmillan). 

For criticism, see Lowell's " Fable for Critics " and " Emerson the Lecturer " 
in " My Study Windows " (Houghton Mifflin) ; E. C. Stedman in " Poets of 
America" (Houghton Mifflin); G. W. Curtis in "Literary and Social Essays" 
(Harper); John Burroughs in "Indoor Studies" (Houghton Mifflin); W. C. 
Brownell in "American Prose Masters" (Scribner); and P. E. More in the 
" Cambridge History of American Literature " (Putnam). For an account of the 
Transcendental movement and of the Brook Farm experiment, see Frothingham's 
"George Ripley" in the American Men of Letters series (Houghton Mifflin) and 
his history of " Transcendentalism in New England." Lindsay Swift has written a 
volume on " Brook Farm " (Macmillan), 




IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 



The little town of Salem in Massachusetts is memorable 
chiefly because of the pitiful witchcraft trials held there 
two hundred years ago. One of the judges most active in 
the task of convicting the poor creatures then accused of 
evil practices was John Hathorne. In Salem there lived, 
first and last, six generations of this family (spelling its 
name sometimes Hathorne and sometimes Hawthorne) ; 
and in Salem Judge Hathorne's grandson's grandson was 
born in 1804 on the Fourth of July — a fitting birthday for 
an author so intensely American as Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

"3 



114 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Four years after the boy's birth, his father, a sea captain, 
died at Surinam ; and his mother never recovered from 
the blow of her -husband's death, withdrawing herself 
wholly from society, and living for forty years the life of a 
recluse, even to the extent of taking her meals apart from 
her children. 

When Nathaniel Hawthorne was eight or nine years old 
his mother took up her residence on the banks of Sebago 
Lake in Maine, where the family owned a large tract of 
land. Here the boy ran wild, fishing and swimming, 
shooting and skating — and, on the rainy days, reading. 
This life in the woods 
increased the liking for 
solitude which he in- 
herited from his mother, 
and which in after years 
he was never able wholly 
to overcome. In time 
he went back to Salem 
to prepare for college. 
In 1821, being then 
seventeen, he entered 
Bowdoin, having Long- 
fellow for a classmate, and making a close friend of 
Franklin Pierce, who was in the class before him and who 
was afterward President of the United States. 

He was graduated in 1825, and he then went back to 
Salem. The family was fairly well-to-do, and it was not 
needful for Nathaniel to hurry in choosing a profession. 
He had already decided that he wished to be an author, 
but authorship offered little chance of a livelihood. There 
was not then a single prosperous magazine in the United 
States. Yet the '' Sketch Book *' and the ** Spy,'' the pio- 




Hawthorne's Birthplace, Salem, Mass. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE ITS 

neers of American literature, had been published not five 
years before ; and the success of Irving and of Cooper, 
and the prompt appreciation with which their early 
writings were received both in America and in England, 
was encouraging to other native authors. So the year 
after he left college Hawthorne wrote a tale and published 
it at his own expense ; but it made no impression on the 
public, and very few copies were sold. 

The tale appeared without the author's name, and its 
failure seems to have increased Hawthorne's love of soli- 
tude. For ten years and more he lived in his mother's 
house almost as alone as if he were a hermit in a cave. 
For months together he scarcely met any one outside of 
his own family, seldom going out save at twilight or to 
take the nearest way to the desolate seashore. Once a 
year, or thereabouts (so he told a friend a long while after), 
he used to make an excursion of a few weeks, '' in which 
I enjoyed as much of life as other people do in the whole 
year's round." Unnatural as this existence was, Hawthorne 
kept his health and seldom lost his cheerfulness. He 
read endlessly and he wrote unceasingly. These were 
his 'prentice years of authorship ; and in them he became 
a master of the craft of writing. 

Most of his early attempts at fiction he burned ; but in 
time his hand became surer, and he found that he had 
learned at last the difficult art of story telling. His little 
tales began to be published here and there in monthlies 
and in annuals. Being anonymous, or under differing 
signatures, they did not attract attention to the author; 
but in the newspaper notices of the periodicals in which 
they appeared, they were often picked out for praise. 

This finally encouraged Hawthorne to gather a score 
of them into a single volume published in 1837 under the 



Il6 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

apt title of '' Twice-Told Tales." Although the little book 
had no remarkable sale, it won its way steadily ; and the 
readers who had enjoyed Irving's pleasant sketches of 
New York character in '' Rip Van Winkle " and the 
''Legend of Sleepy Hollow" could not but. remark that 
Hawthorne's pictures of New England character revealed 
a stronger imagination and a deeper insight into human 
nature. Delightful as was Irving's writing, Hawthorne 
had a richer style and a firmer grasp of the art of fiction. 

After the publication of this collection of short-stories, 
Hawthorne ceased to be what he once called himself — 
''the obscurest man of letters in America." His class- 
mate Longfellow, with whom he had not been intimate 
in college, reviewed the book with hearty commendation. 
Hawthorne wrote him that hitherto there liad "been no 
warmth of approbation, so that I have always written with 
benumbed fingers." Now at last he basked in the sunshine 
of public approval, and he was encouraged to go on with his 
writing. Yet it was five years before his next book was 
issued, and even then the new volume was only a second 
series of "Twice-Told Tales," collected from the periodicals. 

But meanwhile he had come out into the world again, 
and mixed once more with his fellow-men. He had edited 
a magazine for a few months ; he had held a place for two 
years in the Boston customhouse; he had been one of 
those who formed a settlement at Brook Farm ; and he 
had married Miss Sophia Peabody. The marriage took 
place in 1842, and the young couple moved to Concord. 
They went to live in the house which had been built for 
Emerson's grandfather, and in which Emerson himself 
had dwelt ten years before. Hawthorne took for his study 
the room in this old manse in which Emerson had written 
"Nature"; and in that room, during the next few years, 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 



117 



he wrote stories and sketches which were collected into 
the two volumes published in 1846 as ''Mosses from an 
Old Manse." 

These tales are like those in Hawthorne's earlier collec- 
tions, but they are unlike any stories ever written any- 
where else by anybody else. They are strangely inter- 
esting, most of them ; they are novel, varied, and ingenious ; 
they are full of fancy ; and they have often an allegory 
hidden within, and a profound moral also, rarely obtruded, 



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The Old Manse 



but to be found easily by all who take the trouble to seek 
it. Here may be the best place to note that these same 
qualities, ripened, perhaps, and enriched by experience, 
are to be found again in Hawthorne's final collection of 
tales made six years later, and called, after the first of 
them, the '' Snow Image." 



Il8 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Hawthorne was happier in these years of manhood 
than he had been in his youth. It might almost be said 
that his marriage was the making of him ; for that had 
brought him back into the world before it was too late 
— before the doors of solitude were closed upon him 
forever. Yet these early years of wedded life were a 
time of struggle ; for he had lost money, and had little 
to live on. 

Knowing his need of an assured income to bring up his 
young family, some of his friends in 1846 secured his 
appointment as surveyor of the port of Salem, the town 
where he had been born about forty years before. He 
remained in the customhouse for three years, with in- 
creasing dislike for the work ; and then he was suddenly 
removed to make a place for a politician. 

When he went home one day, earlier than usual, and 
told his wife that he had lost his place, she exclaimed : 
'* Oh, then you can write your book ! " And when he asked 
what they were to live on while he was writing this book, 
she showed him the money she had been saving up, week 
by week, out of their household expenses. 

That very afternoon he sat down and began to write the 
more serious work of fiction he had longed for leisure to 
attempt. It was really the first book he had written since 
the forgotten and unknown romance. The other volumes 
he had published were but collections of tales, while this 
was to be a story long enough to stand by itself. A broader 
experience is needed to compose a full-grown novel than 
to sketch a short-story, and the great novelists have often 
essayed their first elaborate fictions when no longer young. 
Scott was more than forty when he published the first of 
the Waverley novels ; Thackeray was not far from forty 
when ''Vanity Fair" was finished; George Eliot was al- 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 1 19 

most forty when '' Adam Bede " appeared ; and Hawthorne 
was forty-six when he sent forth the * Scarlet Letter " in 
1850. 

With the striking exception of '* Uncle Tom's Cabin,'* 
no American work of fiction has had the quick and last- 
ing popularity of the *' Scarlet Letter"; and while Mrs. 
Stowe's story owed much of its success to the public inter- 
est in the slavery question, Hawthorne's romance had 
no such outside aid. Hawthorne's study of the Puritan 
life in New England is superior to Mrs. Stowe's novel. It 
is a masterpiece of narrative, every incident being so aptly 
chosen, so skillfully prepared, so well placed, that it seems 
a necessary result of the situation. Since the *' Scarlet 
Letter" was written more than half a century has passed, 
and many books highly praised when it was first published 
are now left unread ; but Hawthorne's great story stands 
to-day higher than ever before in the esteem of those best 
fitted to judge. 

The author thought that the romance was too somber, 
and he relieved it with a humorous sketch of his life in the 
Salem customhouse. The reading public gave the book 
so hearty a welcome that Hawthorne was warmed out of 
his chilly solitude. For the first time he tasted popularity, 
and it did him good. He moved to Lenox, and there he 
wrote a second long story, less solemn than the first, 
brisker and brighter, and yet not without the same solid 
and serious merits. The ''House of the Seven Gables" 
was published in 185 1. It is rather a romance than a 
novel ; and in it the author allowed his humor more play 
than had been becoming in the ''Scarlet Letter." Like 
that; the new story was a study of the life the author best 
knew. How well he knew it may be judged from Lowell's 
declaration that the " House of the Seven Gables " is "the 



I20 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

most valuable contribution to New England history that 
has yet been made." 

A true historian Hawthorne might be in his understand- 
ing of the conditions of life in the old colony days, and of 
the feelings of the men and women who then walked the 
streets of Salem ; but a story teller he was above all else — 
a teller of tales to whom every lover of literature could not 
but listen eagerly. And in the next volume he made ready 
for the press he presented himself simply as a teller of 
tales. The ''Wonder Book for Girls and Boys," written 
in the same year as the '' House of the Seven Gables," is 
the book which has most endeared Hawthorne to Ameri- 
can children, who have been charmed with the ease and the 
grace with which he set forth anew the marvelous myths of 
antiquity. 

In the '' Wonder Book " he retold the legends of the 
"Gorgon's Head" and the ''Three Golden Apples" and 
the '* Chimaera " ; and in '* Tanglewood Tales " (which was 
published two or three years later, but which may be con- 
sidered as a second volume of the '* Wonder Book") he 
described the adventures of those who went forth to seek 
the *' Golden Fleece," to explore the labyrinth of the 
*' Minotaur," and to sow the "Dragon's Teeth." 

His next story for grown-up people was called the 
"Blithedale Romance," and it was published in 1852. It 
was derived more or less closely from the memory of his 
own experiences a few years before at Brook Farm, where a 
little group of reformers and men of letters, led astray for 
a moment by some of the notions of the time, sought to 
simplify their lives by doing themselves the rough work of 
a New England farm. The most valuable result of this 
experiment is perhaps Hawthorne's story ; and that story 
is generally held to be the least interesting and the least 




4 



121 



122 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

satisfactory of all that Hawthorne wrote. Here, indeed, 
was the instance where he was not fortunate in his choice 
of a subject. 

In the year the '' Blithedale Romance " was published 
Hawthorne went back once more to Concord ; and there 
he bought the house of Mr. Alcott, the father of the 
author of "Little Women." This house he called *'The 
Wayside," and it was the home of the family until Haw- 
thorne's death. But they did not live in it long at first. 
One of the candidates for the presidency of the United 
States was Hawthorne's college friend, Franklin Pierce, for 
whom he prepared a campaign biography — just as other 
men of letters have written lives of friends who were can- 
didates for the presidency. When Pierce became Presi- 
dent he appointed Nathaniel Hawthorne consul to Liver- 
pool, England, one of the best-paid offices under the gov- 
ernment. Hawthorne lived in England for four years ; 
and then he made a journey to France, Switzerland, and 
Italy, lingering in Rome long enough to gather materials 
for a new story, and returning in 1859 ^^ England to 
write it. 

This new story, published early in i860, was the *' Mar- 
ble Faun, a Romance of Monte Beni " (known in Eng- 
land as ''Transformation," because the British publisher 
chose to change the title). It was a tale of life in Italy. 
The beauty of the story is felt by all its readers, and its 
power cannot be denied. But the book abounds in shad- 
owy suggestions ; and some of its outlines are so misty 
that we are still a little in doubt as to what did happen 
to all of the characters. Never before had Hawthorne 
been more vaguely mysterious ; and rarely before had 
the magic of his manner been more charming to his 
admirers. 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 



123 



Perhaps the vagueness of this story was the result of its 
scene being laid upon a foreign soil, whereon Hawthorne 
did not feel himself absolutely at home. At the very time 
he was planning the ''Marble Faun" he recorded in his 
notebook that ''it needs the native air to give life a 
reality. " Despite its hazily hinted plot, the " Marble Faun" 
is cherished by Hawthorne's admirers as second only to 
the "Scarlet Letter." And, as it happened, it was the 
last of his romances he was to live long enough to complete. 




The Wayside 



In i860 Hawthorne returned to his native air, settling 
down in "The Wayside" at Concord. He planted trees, 
laid out walks, enlarged the house, and made himself at 
home. He had a theme for a new romance; and this he 
sketched out two or three times, and differently every 
time, but never to his own satisfaction. 



124 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Failing to get the strange subject of this proposed tale 
into the perfect form he sought, Hawthorne turned from 
it for a while. He had always kept a journal, writing in 
it freely when the mood was on him, setting down sugges- 
tions for stories, recording visits and conversations, and 
describing people and places. From this storehouse he 
now selected passages concerning England and the Eng- 
lish, and these he wove into a series of characteristic chap- 
ters, published in 1863. The title which Hawthorne gave 
to these collected papers was *' Our Old Home " — and the 
title itself was an evidence of the kindly and fraternal 
feeling of Americans toward the elder branch of the race. 
This same gentle liking inspired the English pages of 
Irving's ''Sketch Book"; and it also controlled the criti- 
cism in Emerson's acute ''English Traits." 

After the publication of this volume of descriptive 
papers, Hawthorne returned to his story, and finally man- 
aged to write the earlier chapters. But his health was fail- 
ing fast, and he was not able to finish what he had begun. 
He made several little journeys in search of relief; and it 
was on one of these, a trip to the White Mountains with 
Franklin Pierce, that he died. His death took place at 
Plymouth, New Hampshire, a little before midnight on 
May 18, 1864; and on the twenty-third he was buried at 
Concord in the cemetery called "Sleepy Hollow." 

Emerson and Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier, were at 
the funeral. Longfellow wrote in his diary : " It was a 
lovely day ; the village all sunshine and blossoms and the 
song of birds. You cannot imagine anythmg at once more 
sad and beautiful. He is buried on a hilltop under the 
pines." 

And this funeral of his classmate suggested to Long- 
fellow one of his most tender poems: — 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 125 

Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream 

Dimly my thought defines ; 
I only see — a dream within a dream — 

The hilltop hearsed with pines. 

****** 
There in seclusion and remote from men 

The wizard hand lies cold. 
Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, 

And left the tale hall told. 

At intervals since Hawthorne's death all the writings he 
left behind him have been published, one after another — 
his private letters, the notebooks he kept irregularly in 
America and in Europe, and the several efforts he made 
to shape the story he finally left unfinished when he died. 
But the publication of these things never intended for the 
public has not interfered with his fame. Though they did 
not add to it, they did not detract from it. They took us 
in some measure into his workshop, but they could not 
reveal the secret of his art : that died with him. They 
showed that his English was always pure and clear, and 
that his style was always simple and noble. They revealed 
little or nothing of real value for an estimate of the author, 
though they served to confirm the belief that he brooded 
long over his tales and his romances, shaping each to the 
inward moral it was to declare, and perfecting each slowly 
until it had attained in every detail the symmetry which 
should satisfy his own most exacting taste. 

Many have marveled that Hawthorne should have been 
able to write romances here in this new country of ours, 
which seems to lack all that others have considered need- 
ful for romance ; but to a seer of his insight this was no 
difficult matter. Hawthorne was able to find romance not 
in external trappings and picturesque fancy costumes, but 
deep down in the soul of man himself. 



126 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Besides this power of entering into the recesses of the 
human heart, he had also a vigorous imagination, great 
ingenuity in inventing incident, and the gift of the story- 
telUng faculty in a high degree. These qualities all com- 
bined to make the *' Scarlet Letter " the most perfectly 
proportioned work of fiction that America has yet pro- 
duced. 

Questions. — What can you say of the Hawthorne family; of 
Nathaniel Havvthorne^s early life and of his education? 

Describe Hawthorne's life during his early years of authorship. 

What characteristics of Hawthorne's writings enabled him to find a 
growing audience among the admirers of Irving and Cooper? 

How was Hawthorne brought back into the world before the doors of 
solitude were closed upon him forever? 

How did he find the opportunity to begin the work of his life? 

Compare the '' Scarlet Letter " with the only American work of fic- 
tion which has had as quick and lasting a popularity as it has enjoyed. 

Tell how he succeeded in interesting children in one of his works. 

How did Hawthorne suddenly find his course of life turned in a new 
direction ? 

How may Hawthorne's life for the next few years account for the 
shadowy character of the most skillfully mysterious of his stories? 

What evidence may the reader of Hawthorne find in his works that 
he shared the sentiments of at least two other famous American writers 
toward the elder branch of the English-speaking race? 

What qualities combined to make Hawthorne the greatest American 
writer of fiction that has yet appeared? 

Note. — The only complete editions of Hawthorne's works are those issued 
by Houghton Mifflin. (Popular edition, 8 vols. Riverside edition with notes by 
G. P. Lathrop, 13 vols.) 

There are biographies by G. P. Lathrop (Houghton Mifflin), Henry James 
(Harper), Julian Hawthorne (Houghton Mitfiin), M. D. Conway (Scribncr), and 
G. E. Woodberry (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see Poe's review of " Twice Told Tales " ; G. W. Curtis in " Liter- 
ary and Social Essays " (Harper) ; T. W. Higginson in " Short Studies of Ameri- 
can Authors " (Longmans) ; Leslie Stephen in " Hours in a Library " (Putnam) ; 
W. D. Howells in " My Literary Passions " (Harper) ; and W. C. BrowncU in 
"American Prose Masters" (Scribner). 




X HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 



In the first ten years of the nineteenth century, there 
were born in New England five of the foremost authors 
of America. Emerson and Hawthorne were respectively 
four and three years older than Longfellow. Whittier 
and Holmes were respectively ten months and two years 
younger. As they grew up and began to write, and got to 
know one another, these authors became friends; and their 
friendship lasted with their lives. One after another they 
all gained fame ; and although not the greatest of the five, 
perhaps, Longfellow was always the most popular. Not 

127 



128 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



merely in the United States and Great Britain, but in 
Canada and Australia and India, and wherever the English 
language is spoken, there were readers in plenty for the 
gentle, the manly, the beautiful verses of Longfellow. 

His mother's father had been a general in . the Revolu- 
tionary army. His mother's brother (after whom he was 
named) had been an officer in the American navy, losing 
his life in Preble's attack on Tripoli. His father, once a 
member of Congress, was one of the leading lawyers of 

Portland. And it was ^ _ 

in that pleasant Maine j 

city that Henry Wads- 
worth Longfellow was 
born, on February 27, 
1807. There he passed 
his childhood. There 
he got that liking for 
the sea and for ships 
and for sailors which 
was to give a salt-water 
savor to so many of his 
ballads. There, as he 
grew to boyhood, he 
browsed amid the books of his father's ample library, 
feeling his love for literature steadily growing. 

He was a schoolboy of twelve when the first numbers 
of Irving's "Sketch Book" appeared, and he read it "with 
ever-increasing wonder and dehght, spellbound by its 
pleasant humor, its melancholy tenderness, its atmosphere 
of revery." A few months before the " Sketch Book ** 
began, Bryant had published his " Thanatopsis," and 
others of his earlier poems followed soon ; so the school- 
boy in Portland came under the influence of Bryant's poetry 




Longfellow's Birthplace 



! HENRY WADSVVORTH LONGFELLOW 129 

j almost at the same time that he felt the charm of Irving*s 

prose. When he was only thirteen the young Longfellow 

1 began to write verses of his own, some of which were 

printed in the newspapers. He was only fourteen when 

he passed the entrance examinations of Bowdoin College, 

where he was to have Hawthorne as a classmate. 

i Long before his college course was over he had made 

I up his mind to become a man of letters. In his last year 

I at Bowdoin, being then eighteen, he wrote to his father : 

' ** I most eagerly aspire after future eminence in literature ; 

my whole soul burns ardently for it, and every earthly 

thought centers in .it." But here in America, in 1825, no 

man could hope to support himself by prose and verse. 

Fortunately just then a professorship of modern lan- 
guages was founded in Bowdoin, and the position was offered 
I to Longfellow, with permission to spend several years in 

I Europe fitting himself for his duties. He accepted eagerly ; 

and his sojourn in France and Spain, in Italy and Germany, 
I made him master of the four great European languages 

with their marvelous literatures. He studied hard and 
wrote little while he was away. At last, in 1829, being 
then twenty-two, he returned to his native land and settled 
' down to teach his fellow-countrymen what he had learned 

abroad. 
^ In 1 83 1 he married Miss Mary Potter. In addition to 

I his work in the college, he found time to write critical arti- 

cles on foreign literature. He seems to have had but few 
poetic impulses at this period ; and his thoughts expressed 
i themselves more naturally in prose. The influence of 

Irving is visible in a series of rambling travel sketches, 
finally revised for publication as a book in 1833, under the 
title ''Outre-Mer: a Pilgrimage beyond the Sea." It has 
not a little of the charm of the ** Sketch Book," with a 



I30 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



deeper poetic grace of its own and a more romantic aroma. 
The year after this first venture into literature, Long- 
fellow was called to the professorship of modern lan- 
guages at Harvard College. Again he went to Europe 
for further study, being absent for a year and a half; 
but his journey was saddened by the death of his wife. 
Toward the end of 1836 he took up his abode in Cam- 
bridge, where he was to reside for the rest of his life — for 




Longffellow's Residence. Cambridgfe. Mass. 

forty-five years. He was made to feel at home in the 
society of the scholars who clustered about Harvard, then 
almost the sole center of culture in the country. 

His work for the college was not so exacting that he 
had not time for literature. The impulse to write poetry 
returned ; yet the next book he pubHshed was the prose 
"Hyperion,'' which appeared in 1839, and which, though 
it has little plot or action, may be called a romance. The 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 131 

youthful and poetic hero, a passionate pilgrim in Europe, 
was, more or less, a reflection of Longfellow himself. 

A few months later, in the same year, he published his 
first volume of poetry — ''Voices of the Night," in which 
he reprinted certain of his earlier verses, most of them 
written while he was at Bowdoin. Some of these boyish 
verses show the influence of Bryant, and others reveal to 
us that the young poet had not yet looked at life for him- 
self, but still saw it through the stained-glass windows of 
European tradition. The same volume contained also 
some more recent poems: the ''Beleaguered City," and 
the "Reaper and the Flowers," and the "Psalm of Life" 
— perhaps the first of his poems to win a swift and abid- 
ing popularity. These lyrics testified that Longfellow 
was beginning to have a style of his own. As Hawthorne 
wrote to him, " Nothing equal to them was ever written in 
this world — this western world, I mean." 

Certainly no American author had yet written any 
poem of the kind so good as the best of those in Long- 
fellow's volume of " Ballads " printed two years later. 
Better than any other American poet Longfellow had 
mastered the difficulties of the story in song ; and he 
knew how to combine the swiftness and the picturesque- 
ness the ballad requires. His ballads have more of 
the old-time magic, more of the early simplicity, than 
those of any other modern English author. Of its kind, 
there is nothing better in the language than the "Skele- 
ton in Armor," with its splendid lyric swing; and the 
"Village Blacksmith" and the "Wreck of the 'Hesperus'" 
are almost as good in their humble sphere. " Excelsior,'* 
in the same volume, voices the noble aspirations of youth, 
and has been taken to heart by thousands of boys and 
girls. 



132 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

He went to Europe again in 1842 for his health; and 
on the voyage home he wrote eight '' Poems on Slavery," 
which he published soon after he landed. The next year 
he married Miss Frances Appleton. About the same 
time he published the *' Spanish Student," a play not 
intended for the theater, and lacking the dramatic action 
the stage demands. Neither the *' Poems on Slavery" 
nor the *' Spanish Student " showed him at his best ; but 
three years after the latter he published the *' Belfry of 
Bruges," in which were to be found more than one of his 
finest poems, among them the ''Old Clock on the Stairs" 
and the ''Arsenal at Springfield." 

Longfellow wrote a cordial review of Hawthorne's 
*' Twice-Told Tales," and it was from Hawthorne that 
he heard the pathetic legend of the two Acadian lovers 
parted on their marriage morn, when the people of the 
French province were shipped away by the British authori- 
ties. *' If you do not want this incident for a tale, let me 
have it for a poem," he said ; and Hawthorne willingly gave 
it up. 

This was the germ of " Evangeline," which Longfellow 
published in 1847, and which was accepted at once as his 
masterpiece. It was the most beautiful and the most 
touching tale in verse yet told by any American poet ; 
and its charm was increased greatly by the skill with 
which the natural scenery of America, and our varying 
seasons, were used to furnish a background before which 
the simple figures of the story moved with fidelity to life. 
Even the strange proper names were invested with magic. 

In 1849 Longfellow published his last prose book, 
"Kavanagh," a dreamy tale which Hawthorne hailed as 
a true picture of life — "as true as those reflections of the 
trees and banks that I used to see in Concord ; but refined 



HENR^ WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1 33 

to a higher degree than they, as if the reflection were itself 
reflected." The next year he gathered into a volume 
called the ''Seaside and the Fireside" a score of short 
poems, including the ''Fire of Driftwood" and the "Build- 
ing of the Ship." With the sea as a subject, Longfellow 
had always a double share of inspiration, for he had re- 
tained in manhood his boyish love for the deep, and his 
sympathetic understanding of its mysteries. 

As his poetic powers ripened and won prompt recogni- 
tion, the daily labor of the classroom became more irksome 
to him, and at last, in 1854, he resigned his professorship. 
But he continued to reside in Cambridge, dwelling in the 
Craigie House, which had been Washington's headquarters. 
Longfellow's father-in-law had bought this home for him, 
and it is now known as the Longfellow House. The culti- 
vated society of the little town was very congenial, and he 
had many friends in Boston and in Concord. 

Like all true artists, he was greatly interested in his 
craft, and was fond of verse-making experiments. He had 
a delicate ear, and he felt the fitness of certain measures 
for certain themes. For " Evangeline " he chose a form 
of verse suggested by the verse of the "Iliad" and the 
*' Aeneid " ; and how well this suited his subject can be 
seen by reading this description of the song of the mock- 
ing-bird : — - 

Then from a neighboring thicket the mocking-bird, wildest of singers, 

Swinging aloft on a willow spray that hung o'er the water. 

Shook from his little throat such floods of delirious music, 

That the whole air and the woods and the waves seemed silent to 

listen. 
Plaintive at first were the tones and sad ; then soaring to madness 
Seemed they to follow or guide the revel of frenzied Bacchantes. 
Single notes were then heard, in sorrowful low lamentation ; 
Till, having gathered them all, he flung them abroad in derision, 



134 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

As when, after a storm, a gust of wind through the tree-tops 
Shakes down the rattling rain in a crystal shower on the branches. 

Now compare the same description as Longfellow himself 
rewrote it in the customary rimed couplets : — 

Upon a spray that overhung the stream. 
The mocking-bird, awaking from his dream, 
Poured such delirious music from his throat 
That all the air seemed listening to his note. 
Plaintive at first the song began, and slow ; 
It breathed of sadness, and of pain and woe ; 
Then, gathering all his notes, abroad he flung 
The multitudinous music from his tongue, — 
As, after showers, a sudden gust again 
Upon the leaves shakes down the rattling rain. 

In his next long poem Longfellow attempted another 
new meter, borrowed from the old Finnish poets. He was 
always interested in the American Indian, and one of his 
earliest poems was the '' Burial of the Minnisink," as one 
of his latest was the ''Revenge of Rain-in-the-face.'' He 
now decided that the mythical legends of the red men could 
be woven into a poem of which an Indian should be the 
central figure. The simple rhythm was exactly suited to 
the simple story. '' Hiawatha" was published in 1855, ^^^ 
its instant success surpassed that of ''Evangeline," which 
was its only rival among the longer poems of American 
authors upon a peculiarly American subject. The easy 
verses sang themselves into the memory of all who read 
the poem ; and the descriptions of nature delighted all 
who had kept their eyes open as they walked through our 
American woods and fields. 

Encouraged by the hearty welcome given to these two 
American poems, Longfellow, in 1858, published a third, 
the "Courtship of Miles Standish." In this he told no 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 135 

pathetic tale of parted lovers, nor did he draw on the quaint 
lore of the red men ; he took his story from the annals of 
his own ancestors, the sturdy founders of New England. 
As it happened, he himself (like his fellow-poet, Bryant) 
was a direct descendant of John Alden and Priscilla, the 
Puritan maiden whose wooing he narrated. The ''Court- 
ship of Miles Standish " is only less popular than its prede- 
cessors, ''Evangeline'' and "Hiawatha"; all three have 
been taken to heart by the American people; all were 
composed during the brightest years of the poet's life, 
when his family were growing up about hirn, when he was 
in the full possession of his powers, and when he had 
already achieved fame. 

Suddenly an awful calamity befell him in the death of his 
wife by accident. One morning in July, 1861, Mrs. Long- 
fellow's light dress caught fire from a match fallen on 
the floor. The poet rushed to her aid ; but despite all 
his efforts her injuries were fatal. She died the next 
morning. Longfellow himself was so severely burned that 
he was unable to be present at her funeral. 

When his wounds healed he was still broken in spirit. 
To give himself occupation, and to help him bear his sor- 
row, he translated into English the "Divine Comedy" of 
Dante. He found the labor of translation restful and con- 
soling, as Bryant had also found it after the death of his 
wife. In time Longfellow completed his version of the 
great Italian poem, and it was published in 1867. But 
while laboring on this long task he had not given up 
original composition. In 1863 he had sent forth a volume 
of poems containing the ringing lines on the sinking of 
the "Cumberland"; and in 1867 another collection in 
which was included his touching poem on the burial of 
Hawthorne. 




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J, 
' '1 1 ? 



r^.^1 i4T^^ 



ty^-ij^ 



J ^ 



3 



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■36 



HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 137 

During these years also Longfellow was engaged on a 
work exactly suited to his powers. As a poet he was not 
primarily a thinker, like Emerson, nor was he chiefly a 
musician in verse, like Poe ; he was above all a ballad 
singer, a teller of stories fit to be said or sung. Certain 
of his friends were in the habit of spending the summer 
at the old tavern of Sudbury, and this suggested to the 
poet the framework of a book. He has represented a 
group of guests gathered about the fire, and beguiling the 
time with story telling. The first part of these ** Tales of a 
Wayside Inn " was published in 1863, and two other parts 
followed in 1872 and 1873. Among the tales are some of 
Longfellow's best ballads — such as "Paul Revere's Ride," 
*'King Robert of Sicily," and '' Scanderbeg." 

In the spring of 1868 Longfellow went with his daugh- 
ters to Europe, and received everywhere an admiring wel- 
come. In England both Oxford and Cambridge conferred 
honorary degrees on him ; and the Queen invited him to 
dine with her at Windsor Castle. He spent the winter in 
Rome, and came home in 1869. 

After his return Longfellow took up and finished his 
longest work — '' Christus, a Mystery," in which he finally 
combined the ''Divine Tragedy," the ''Golden Legend," 
and the "New England Tragedies." His liking for the 
dramatic form grew in his later years ; and the '^ Masque 
of Pandora," which he published in 1875, was actually set 
to music and sung on the stage, but with little success. 
Afterward he wrote another tragedy — " Judas Macca- 
baeus " ; and after his death yet another, " Michael Angelo." 
was found almost finished in his desk. There are fine 
passages in all these poems in dialogue ; but no one of his 
attempts at play-making was received with the popular 
approval which greeted his songs and his sonnets. 



1 38 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Two of the longer of his later poems — the "Hanging 
of the Crane'' (1874) and " Keramos " (1878) —showed 
that his hand had not lost its cunning as the poet grew 
older; and nothing he had written exceeded in sonorous 
rhythm and in lofty sentiment the poem which he read in 
1875 ^t the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation from 
Bowdoin, and which he called *^ Morituri Salutamus " 
( " We who are about to die salute you " ). 

His poetic gift continued to ripen and to bear mellow 
fruit to the end of his life ; and among the lyrics in his 
final volumes — "Ultima Thule," published in 1880, and 
"In the Harbor," printed after his death in 1882 — were 
poems as tender and as delicate in their strength as any 
he had written in his youth : the " Chamber over the 
Gate," for example, and the very last verses he ever wrote 
— the "Bells of San Bias." 

It was on March 15, 1882, when Longfellow had just 
celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, that he penned the 
final lines of this final poem : — 

Out of the shadows of night 
The world rolls into light. 

It is daybreak everywhere. 

The eighteenth was on a Saturday ; and in the afternoon 
there came four schoolboys from Boston, who had asked 
permission to visit him. He showed them the view of the 
Charles from the window of his study, and with his cus- 
tomary kindness he wrote his autograph in their albums. 
That night he was seized with pain ; but he would not dis- 
turb the household until the morning. He lingered a week, 
and died on Friday, March 24, 1882. He was buried the 
next vSunday in Mount Auburn Cemetery, "under the 
gently falling snow." 



HExNRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 1 39 

Longfellow is the most popular poet yet born in Amer- 
ica ; and if we can measure popular approval by the wide- 
spread sale of his successive volumes, he was probably the 
most popular poet of the English language in his century. 
Part of his popularity is due to his healthy mind, his calm 
spirit, his vigorous sympathy. His thought, though often 
deep, was never obscure. His lyrics had always a grace 
that took the ear with delight. They have a singing sim- 
plicity, caught, it may be, from the German lyrists, such as 
Uhland or Heine. This simplicity was the result of rare 
artistic repression ; it was not due to any poverty of intel- 
lect. 

Like Victor Hugo in France, Longfellow in America 
was the poet of childhood. And as he understood the 
children, so he also sympathized with the poor, the toiling, 
the lowly — not looking down on them, but glorifying their 
labor, and declaring the necessity of it and the nobility of 
work. He could make the barest life seem radiant with 
beauty. He had acquired the culture of all lands, but he 
understood also the message of his own country. He 
thought that the best that Europe could bring was none 
too good for the plain people of America. He was a true 
American, not only in his stalwart patriotism in the hour 
of trial, but in his loving acceptance of the doctrine of 
human equality, and in his belief and trust in his fellow- 
man. 

Questions. — What was Longfellow's place among the men who 
formed a remarkable group in New England in the first quarter of the 
present century? 

Speak of Longfellow's family connections ; of his boyhood ; and of 
his opportunities for gaining an education. 

In what official way was Longfellow's scholarship recognized by two 
institutions of learning? 



I40 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



In what early works does Longfellow show the influence of two 
earlier American authors — one a writer in prose, the other in verse? 

By what one of his poems did Longfellow win a swift and abiding 
popularity ? 

What is the secret of his success in the kind of poems of w^hich the 
'' Skeleton in Armor '' is an example ? 

What events of importance to Longfellow clustered around the year 
1843? 

Mention the circumstances under which Longfellow came to write 
the most beautiful tale in verse that had yet been told by any American 
poet. 

How was Longfellow's last prose w^ork characterized by Hawthorne? 

How is Longfellow's skill in versification shown in his poems? 

What American subjects now furnished Longfellow with the themes 
of two poems which rivaled in popularity even his story of the Acadian 
exiles ? 

What did Longfellow do after the death of his wife? 

Discuss Longfellow's dramatic work. 

Give the titles of ten of Longfellow's poems not elsewhere referred 
to in these questions. 

Characterize Longfellow as a man and as a poet. 

Note. — The only complete edition of Longfellow's works is that published by 
Houghton Mifflin (11 vols.). The Cambridge edition contains all the poems in a 
single volume. •' Evangeline," the " Courtship of Miles Standish," " The Song of 
Hiawatha," the "Children's Hour," etc., the "Tales of a Wayside Inn," the 
" Building of the Ship," etc., can be had as separate numbers of the Riverside 
Literature series (Houghton Mifflin). 

The fullest life of Longfellow is that written by his brother, Samuel, and con- 
taining abundant extracts from his journal and correspondence (Houghton Mif- 
flin, 3 vols.). T. VV. Higginson prepared a volume for the American Men of 
Letters series (Houghton Mifflin), and G. R. Carpenter another for the Beacon 
Biographies (Small Maynard) . 

For criticism, see E. C. Stedman in " Poets of America" (Houghton Mifflin) ; 
H. E. Scudder in " Men and Letters " (Houghton Mifflin) ; A. Lang in " Letters 
on Literature" (Longmans) ; G. W. Curtis in " Literary and Social Essays " 
(Harper); T. W. Higginson in "Old Cambridge" (Macmillan) ; W. D. 
Howells in " Literary Friends and Acquaintance" (Harper). 




XI JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

In the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts, near the 
Merrimac River, not far from Salisbury Beach, and in a 
house built by his great-great-grandfather more than two 
centuries ago, John Greenleaf Whittier was born on 
December 17, 1807. He believed that his ancestors were 
Huguenots — and this French stock is among the 
ablest and the sturdiest of all the many which have 
mingled to make the modern American. For three gen- 
erations before him, the family had been connected with 
the Society of Friends ; and all his life long Whittier 

141 



142 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



retained not a little of the Quaker simplicity of manner 
and attire. 

The house was surrounded by woods, and ''a small 
brook, noisy enough as it foamed, rippled, and laughed 
down its rocky falls," by the garden-side. Then it wound 
its way to a larger stream, that, '' after doing its duty at 
two or three saw and grist mills " (the clash of which 




Whittier's Birthplace 

would be heard in still days across the intervening wood- 
lands), ran into the great river and was borne along to the 
great sea. Thus in early boyhood Whittier had a chance 
to get friendly and familiar with brooks and woods and 
rocky hills and all the other details of the New England 
landscape. He began early to do the chores of the house- 
hold and also to aid his father in the work of the farm. 
He helped to care for the oxen and the other beasts of 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER I43 

burden, and he came to know the wilder animals which 
also lived on the farm. His chief companion was a sister, 
who was six years younger, and who devoted herself to 
him for half a century. 

In his boyhood Whittier had scant instruction, for the 
district school was open only a few weeks in winter, and 
its teachers were rarely competent. He had but few 
books, for there were scarcely thirty in the house, mostly 
dry disquisitions on theology. The one book he could 
read and read again until he had it by heart almost was 
the Bible ; and the Bible was always the book which 
exerted the strongest literary influence upon him. 

But when he was fourteen a teacher came who lent him 
books of travel and opened a new world to him. It was 
this teacher who brought to the Whittiers one evening a 
volume of Burns and read aloud some of the poems, after 
explaining the Scottish dialect. Whittier begged the loan 
of the book, which contained almost the first rimes he had 
ever read. It was this volume of Burns which set Whittier 
to making verses himself, serving both as the motive and 
the model of his earlier poetic efforts. The Scottish poet, 
with his homely pictures of a life as bare and as hardy as 
that of New England then, first revealed to the American 
poet what poetry really is, and how it might be made out 
of the actual facts of existence. 

That book of Burns's poems had an even stronger influ- 
ence on Whittier than the odd volume of the ''Spectator'* 
which fell into the hands of Franklin had on that American 
author whose boyhood was most like Whittier's. Franklin 
was also born in a humble and hard-working family, doing 
early his share of the labor, and having but a meager 
education, although always longing for learning. It is 
true that Irving and Cooper and Bryant did not graduate 



144 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

from college, but they could have done so had they per- 
severed ; and Emerson and Longfellow and Hawthorne 
did get as much of the higher education as was then 
possible in America. But neither Franklin nor Whittier 
ever had the chance ; it was as much as they could do in 
boyhood to pick up the merest elements of an education. 

After he had made the acquaintance of Burns's poems, 
Whittier began to scribble rimes of his own on his slate 
at school, and in the evening about the family hearth. 
One of his boyish quatrains lingered in the memory of an 
elder sister : — 

And must I always swing the flail, 

And help to fill the milking pail ? 

I wish to go away to school ; 

I do not wish to be a fool. 

With practice he began to be bolder, and he wrote verses 
on contemporary events and also little ballads. One of 
these, written when he was seventeen, his eldest sister 
liked so well that she sent it to the weekly paper of 
Newburyport, the Free Press, recently started by William 
Lloyd Garrison. She did this without telling her brother, 
and no one was more surprised than he when he opened 
the paper and found his own verses in the '' Poet's Corner.'* 
He was aiding his father to mend a stone wall by the road- 
side as the postman passed on horseback and tossed the 
paper to the young man. *' His heart stood still a moment 
when he saw his own verses. Such delight as his comes 
only once in the lifetime of any aspirant to literary fame. 
His father at last called to him to put up the paper and 
keep at work." 

The editor of the Free Press was only three years older 
than the poet, although far more mature. He did more for 
the young man than merely print these boyish verses, for 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER I45 

he went to Whittier's father and urged the need of giving 
the youth a Httle better education. To do this was not 
possible then ; but two years later, when Whittier was 
nineteen, an academy was started at Haverhill, and here 
he attended, even writing a few stanzas to be sung at the 
opening exercises. 

He studied at Haverhill for two terms, earning the little 
money needed to pay his way by making slippers, by keep- 
ing books, and by teaching school. At Haverhill he was 
able to read the works of many authors hitherto unknown 
to him, and he also wrote for the local papers much prose 
and verse. There was even an attempt to get subscribers 
for a collection of his poems, but it failed, fortunately ; and 
the improving taste of Whittier, when he did publish his 
first volume, led him to reject most of these early verses. 

By the time he was twenty-one he had fitted himself 
to earn his living by his pen. He went to Boston in 1829 
to edit a paper there ; and he returned to Haverhill the 
next year to take charge of the local journal. Then he 
was at the head of an important weekly at Hartford. In 
these various positions he acquitted himself well, master- 
ing the questions of the day carefully, and expressing his 
opinions forcibly and courteously. But his health failed, 
owing partly perhaps to the exposure and toil of his boy- 
hood on the farm ; and in 1832 he gave up journalism for 
a while and went back to his father's house. He had 
never been robust, and all his life long he was forced to 
take care of himself and to husband his strength. 

But if the body was weak, the spirit was strong ; Whit- 
tier had the stout heart which leads a forlorn hope unhesi- 
tatingly. Before he was thirty he had made up his mind 
that it was his duty to do what he could for the relief of 
the unfortunate negroes who were held in bondage in the 



146 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



South. In 1833 he wrote a pamphlet called "Justice and 
Expediency/' in which he considered the whole question 
of slavery, and declared the necessity of its abolition. 
Three years later he became secretary of the Antislavery 
Society. In 1838 he went to Philadelphia to edit the 
Pennsylvania Freeman ; and so boldly did he advocate 
the right of the negro to own himself that the printing 
office was sacked by a mob and burned. Then, as more 
than once afterward for the same cause, Whittier was in 
danger of his life. 

Whittier showed physical courage in facing the ruffians 
who wished to prevent free speech ; but he had revealed 
the higher moral courage in casting in his lot with the 
little band of abolitionists. He had looked forward to 
political preferment, as well he might, when many another 
journalist was stepping from the newspaper desk into 
public life. When he became one of the very small mi- 
nority who denounced slavery, he gave up all chance of 
office. He also had literary ambition, but so strong was 
the power of the slave owners then, and so intolerant were 
they, that most editors and publishers were sorely intimi- 
dated, and declined to print any attack on slavery, and 
even the other writings of an author who was known 
as an abolitionist. Thus Whittier, in identifying himself 
with the antislavery movement, thought that he was giv- 
ing up his literary future also. He made his decision 
promptly, and he never regretted it. Indeed, in later life 
he said to a boy of fifteen to whom he was giving counsel, 
*^My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some 
unpopular but noble cause." 

By constant practice he had acquired ease in composi- 
tion ; but as his hand gained strength his taste also im- 
proved, and little of this earlier writing satisfied him for 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 147 

long. A miscellany of prose and verse called ''Legends 
of New England," published in 183 1, was his first book. 
It contained a selection of the best of the poems and the 
essays he had printed here and there in periodicals. In 
later life he thought so slightly of this volume that none 
of the essays, and only two of the poems, were republished 
in the revised edition of his works. Immature as was this 
youthful verse, scarcely any American had then written 
better. Bryant's first volume, and Poe's, had been pub- 
lished several years before ; but Longfellow's earliest book 
of poems, ''Voices of the Night," did not appear until 1839, 
to be followed in 1847 by the first collection of Emerson's 
poems. 

Other poems, which Whittier discarded in later life, 
were published in the next few years. The most vigorous 
of the verses he wrote at this time were inspired by his 
hatred of slavery. From the day he threw himself into 
the abolition movement, his verse had a loftier note and a 
more resonant tone. With him poetry was then no longer 
a mere amusement or accomplishment ; it had become a 
weapon for use in the good fight. 

In these antislavery poems there is a noble passion and 
a righteous anger. They were calls to a battle with evil ; 
and the best of them rang out like blasts of a bugle. One 
collection of these antislavery verses was published in 
1837, and a second, called "Voices of Freedom," appeared 
in 1849. When we compare either of these volumes with 
Longfellow's "Poems on Slavery" (printed in 1842, mid- 
way between them), we see how much sturdier Whittier's 
stanzas are, and how much more his heart is in the cause 
than Longfellow's. It is Longfellow who writes with 
Quaker-like gentleness, and it is Whittier who boldly 
sounds the trumpet of battle. 



148 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



In other ways also is the contrast between Longfellow 
and Whittier interesting and instructive. Both were New 
Englanders, and both abhorred slavery. Longfellow was 
the most literary of all our poets, and Whittier was per- 
haps the least. By consummate art Longfellow sometimes 
achieved simplicity, but he never could attain the homely 
directness natural to Whittier. Longfellow's chief service 
to our literature was in showmg how it was possible to get 




WhJttier's Residence, Amesbury, Mass. 

the best that Europe and the storied past could give, and 
yet to remain an American of the present. Whittier dealt 
almost wholly with the facts of American life, with the 
legends and the thoughts, with the landscape and the 
people of New England. Where Longfellow was cosmo- 
politan, Whittier was less than national even, he was 
sectional ; and he was therefore too local in his themes 
and in his manner to win popularity in England as Long- 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 149 

fellow did. Here in the United States, however, where 
the influence of New England is widespread and abiding, 
Whittier came at last to have a popularity second only to 
Longfellow's, and due largely to the fact that he, more 
than any other, was the representative poet of New 
England. 

Whittier was the only one of the leading American 
poets who never crossed the Atlantic. Not only did he 
never go to Europe, he never went south of the Potomac 
or west of the AUeghanies. When the farm at Haverhill 
was sold in 1836, part of the price was used to buy a small 
place at Amesbury ; and that house was Whittier's home 
for more than half a century. After his return from Phila- 
delphia, in 1839, ^^ w^s rarely absent from Amesbury for 
more than a month or two at a time, although he did once 
reside the better part of a year in Lowell. He made visits 
to Boston often and sometimes even to New York ; and 
frequently he spent his summers elsewhere; but until his 
death his home was the little house at Amesbury. 

Though his abolition sentiments were boldly insisted 
upon in most of his writings, they did not prevent the 
steady rise of his poetic reputation even among those who 
were not of his way of thinking. With the publication in 
1843 of '' Lays of My Home," Whittier made sure his 
place among American poets. In this volume are some 
of the best of his ballads, — ''Cassandra Southwick," for 
one — and as a writer of ballads Longfellow only, among 
all the American poets, was Whittier's superior. 

He had the gift of story-telling in verse. He did not 
strain his invention to devise a strange plot ; he took an 
old legend or a tale of real life, and he set it forth in rime 
simply and easily. He had the touch of genius which 
transfigures common things. He sang of what he knew, 



I50 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the fields where he played as a boy, the river and the hills 
he had gazed on in childhood, the men and women who 
had grown up about him, the thoughts and the sentiments 
he and they had inherited together. Even the unpromis- 
ing proper names of New England become melodious in 
his hands. . 

As the years passed, Whittier's powers ripened and the 
level of his work was raised ; but the quality of the poems 
included in *' Songs of Labor,'' published in 1850, and in 
'*Home Ballads," published in i860, is the quality of the 
collection published in 1843. Among the verse written 
during these seventeen years are the "Angels of Buena 
Vista" ; *'Maud Muller" (perhaps the most popular of all 
his briefer poems) , '' Ichabod " (perhaps the loftiest of all 
laments over fallen greatness) ; the '^ Barefoot Boy " ; 
*' Skipper Ireson's Ride " (one of his most characteristic 
New England ballads) ; and the tribute to Robert Burns. 
The poet of New England was always swift to declare his 
indebtedness to the poet of Scotland and to proclaim his 
abiding regard for the poems which had first shown him 
what poetry was. 

During these years of the antislavery struggle not only 
was Whittier's reputation as a poet growing steadily, but 
the people of the North and of the West were as steadily 
coming over to his side. Of course we cannot exactly 
measure the influence of a lyric, but it may be almost 
irresistible. He was a wise man who was willing to let 
others make the laws of a people if only he could make 
their songs. Law is but the condensation of public 
opinion ; and when the ringing stanzas of the antislavery 
bards and the speeches of the antislavery orators had 
awakened the conscience of the free states, the end of the 
evil was nigh. Slavery made a hard fight for its life ; but 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 151 

it was slavery itself that Whittier hated, and not the slave 
owners; and there is no bitterness or rancor in the poems 
published in 1863 and called '' In War Time." Even in his 
most martial lines there is a Quaker suavity ; and of these 
ballads of the battle years the best known is " Barbara 
Frietchie," a testimony to the old flag, not a diatribe 
against those who were then attacking it. And it is known 
now to be founded on a misapprehension of the facts. 

After the final triumph of the cause for which he had 
battled long and bravely, Whittier turned again to peaceful 
themes. With the spread of his opinions among the 
people, his poetry had also become more popular ; but no 
single book of his had ever a widespread and immediate 
success until *' Snow-Bound " appeared in 1866. This 
poem of New England was seen at once to be worthy 
of comparison with the *' Deserted Village " and with 
the " Cotter's Saturday Night," with, more of the real 
flavor of the soil than Goldsmith's lines, and with less 
breadth, but no less elevation, than Burns's. It was 
received by the reading public as no other poem since 
Longfellow's *' Evangeline " and "Hiawatha." It was so 
profitable that for the first time in his life — and he was 
then nearly sixty — Whittier was placed above want. 

Only less successful was the " Tent on the Beach," 
printed the next year, and followed in twelve months by 
** Among the Hills." Thereafter his position was secure. 
He had taken his place as one of the poets of America, 
beside Emerson and Longfellow, beside Lowell and 
Holmes ; and perhaps he was nearer than any of the 
others to the hearts of New Englanders and of the 
Westerners whose fathers had gone out from New Eng- 
land. He has been called a Quaker Burns ; he could 
better be called the Burns of New England ; and as Burns 



-juj-ejct ^^ur-K, , 




.ex 












^b^ 



/^t:-ef~e>Cs 



152 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 153 

wrote for Scotland rather than for the whole of Great 
Britain, so Whittier wrote for New England rather than 
for the whole of the United States. It was the scenery 
of New England he loved best to paint in his ballads ; 
it was the sentiments of New England he voiced in his 
lyrics ; it was his steadfast faith in New England that 
gave strength to all he wrote. 

During the later years of his life Whittier wrote as the 
mood came, and he gathered his scattered verses into 
volumes from time to time — *' Ballads of New England/' 
for example, in 1870; ''Mabel Martin," in 1874; the 
** King's Missive," in 1881. While no one of these collec- 
tions repeated the impression made by '' Snow-Bound," they 
strengthened his hold on the hearts of the people. No 
doubt his old age was made happier by the honor in which 
he was held. Though his health was not good, he came 
of sturdy stock, and he outlived the most of his fellow- 
poets of New England. He saw Longfellow go first, and 
then Emerson, and finally Lowell, his comrade in the anti- 
slavery struggle. Long past the allotted three-score years 
and ten, he printed a final volume of his poems in 1892, 
under the significant title '' At Sundown." At last, early in 
the fall of 1892, he had a slight paralytic shock, and he died 
at dawn on September 7, being then in his eighty-fifth year. 

It is as a poet that Whittier is held most in honor, but 
he was also a writer of prose ; and in the final collected 
edition of his works published four years before his death 
his prose writings fill three of the seven volumes. Of 
these prose writings the most important is an attempt to 
reconstruct (in the form of a diary) the life of the first 
settlers; it is called ''Margaret Smith's Journal in the 
Province of Massachusetts Bay, 1678-79," and it was first 
published in 1849. ^^ ^^'^^ P^^^ himself said, "Its merit 



154 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

consists mainly in the fact that it presents a tolerably life- 
like picture of the past, and introduces us familiarly to the 
hearts and homes of New England in the seventeenth 
century/' The poet also preserved in these three volumes 
what seemed to him best worth keeping of all his earlier 
tales and sketches and of his later literary criticisms and 
personal tributes. 

He revised at the same time the more important of his 
antislavery tracts and articles. As slavery has been abol- 
ished forever in this country, the interest of these polemic 
writings is now mainly historical ; they show us how the 
men felt and thought who were in the thick of the fight 
for freedom. It is the hard fate of nearly all writing 
done to aid a cause that it is killed by its own success. 
Just as soon as the result is attained the articles which 
helped to bring this about will cease to reward reading. 
From this hard fate some of Whittier's antislavery and 
war poetry is saved by its own intrinsic beauty — a beauty 
lacking in his prose, however. The same neglect has also 
befallen not a little of the vigorous writing of Benjamin 
Franklin. 

Unlike as Whittier and Franklin were in many respects, 
they were alike in others. Both of them had the sym- 
pathy with the lowly which comes of early experience. 
Both learned a handicraft, for as a boy Franklin set type 
and worked a printing press, and Whittier had learnt the 
trade of slipper-making. To both of them literature was 
a means, rather than an end in itself. Verse to Whit- 
tier, and prose to Franklin, was a weapon to be used in 
the good fight. In Whittier's verse, as in FrankHn's 
prose, there was the same pithy directness which made 
their words go home to the hearts of the plain people 
whom they both understood and represented. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 1^5 

In the fortunate absence of any class distinctions in 
this country, both Franklin and Whittier were able to 
develop at will, expanding freely as occasion served, and 
educating themselves into harmony with broader oppor- 
tunities. To Franklin was given the larger life and the 
greater range of usefulness ; but Whittier always did with 
all his might the duty that lay before him. 

While Whittier was practical, as becomes a New Eng- 
lander, he had not the excessive common sense which 
characterizes Franklin, and he lacked also Franklin's 
abundant humor. So also his morality was of finer fiber 
than Franklin's. He was not content, as Franklin was, 
with showing that honesty is the best policy, and that in 
the long run vice does not pay ; he scourged evil with 
the wrath of a Hebrew prophet. His views of life were 
Hebraic rather than Hellenic, for he sought duty, as the 
Jews did, rather than beauty, as did the Greeks. No one 
of his poems was written for its own sake, with the excep- 
tion only of a few of his ballads. They were nearly all 
intended to further a cause he held dear, or to teach a les- 
son he thought needful. 

For the most part his art was unconscious ; he sang 
because he was a born poet. He was not an artist in 
verse as Longfellow was ; and he was often as careless in 
rime and as rugged in rhythm as was Emerson. Yet to 
some of his stanzas there is a lyric lilt that sings itself 
into the memory ; and the best of his ballads have an easy 
grace of movement. He knew his own deficiencies of 
training, and he was quick to take advice from those whom 
he thought better equipped than himself. In this as in all 
things else he was modest. How modest he really was is 
perhaps best shown in certain quatrains of the poem he 
called '' My Triumph " : — 



156 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 

O living friends who love me ! 

dear ones gone above me ! 
Careless of other fame, 

1 leave to you my name. 

Hide it from idle praises, 

Save it from evil phrases ; 

Why, when dear lips that spake it 

Are dumb, should strangers wake it ? 

Let the thick curtain fall ; 
I better know than all 
How little I have gained, 
How vast the unattained. 

Sweeter than any sung 

My songs that found no tongue ; 

Nobler than any fact 

My wish that failed of act. 

Others shall sing the song. 
Others shall right the wrong — 
Finish what I begin — 
And all I fail of win. 



Questions. — How in his boyhood did Whittier learn to love 
Nature? 

With what kinds of books did he first become acquainted? 

Compare his educational advantages with those of other American 
men of letters. 

Tell how he made the acquaintance of the leading antislavery agi- 
tator of his day, and in what w^ay the connection was beneficial to him. 

What efforts and sacrifices did Whittier make in order to be of ser- 
vice to the cause to w hich he devoted himself ? 

Trace the growth of Whittier's literary skill during the twenty years 
of this period in his life. 

Contrast the representative New England poet with the representa- 
tive American poet. 

Characterize the work in three collections of Whittier's poems pub- 
lished between 1843 ^^^ i860. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 157 

Discuss Whittier's service in the cause which his book " In War 
Time '' was designed to further. 

Compare with the most famous works of Burns and Goldsmith the 
poem by which Whittierwon a degree of literary and financial success 
surpassing anything which he had known hitherto. 

What is the general character of Whittier's later poems? 

What can you say of Whittier\s reputation as a writer in prose? 

Compare Whittier and Franklin. 

Make an estimate of Whittier's art. 

Note. — The only complete edition of Whittier's works is that published by 
Houghton Mifflin (7 vols.). The Cambridge edition contains all the poems in a 
single volume. " Snow-Bound," " Mabel Martin," etc., the " Tent on the Beach," 
etc., can be had as separate numbers of the Riverside Literature series (Houghton 
Mifflin). 

The authoritative biography is that of S. T. Pickard (Houghton Mifflin). G. R. 
Carpenter wrote the life in the American Men of Letters series (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see Lowell's " Fable for Critics " (Houghton Mifflin) ; E. C. Sted- 
man in " Poets of America " (Houghton Mifflin) ; and Barrett Wendell in " Stel- 
ligeri " (Scribner). 




XII OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



Oliver Wendell Holmes was born in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, on August 29, 1809. During the Revolu- 
tion his grandfather had served as a surgeon with the 
Continental troops ; and his father was the author of the 
** Annals of America," almost the first attempt at a docu- 
mentary history of this country. He grew to boyhood in 
Cambridge, often playing under the Washington elm. He 
was sent to Phillips Academy, Andover ; and it was while 
he was a schoolboy there that he translated the first book 
of Vergil's '' Aeneid " into heroic couplets — the meter used 

158 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 159 

by Pope in his version of Homer's ''Iliad." Then he went 
to Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1829, eight 
years after Emerson and nine years before Lowell. He 
wrote prose and verse while he was at Harvard, contribut- 
ing freely to the college paper ; and he delivered the poem 
at commencement. 

Settling down in his native town he began to study law, 
but his heart was not in his task, and he sought relief in 
writing verse, mostly comic. That he could be serious 
upon occasion was shown swiftly the year after his gradu- 
ation, when it was proposed to break up the frigate ''Con- 
stitution" — "Old Ironsides " — the victor in the splendid 
fight with the British ship "Guerriere" in the war of 18 12. 
With the hot indignation of youth against what seemed 
to him an insult and an outrage upon a national glory, 
Holmes wrote the fiery lines beginning : — 

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down, 

Long has it waved on high, 
And many an eye has danced to see 

That banner in the sky ; 
Beneath it rung the battle shout, 

And burst the cannon's roar ; 
The meteor of the ocean air 

Shall sweep the clouds no more. 

This lyric appeal to patriotic feeling was first published 
in the Boston Advertiser ; it was copied all over the coun- 
try ; it was quoted in speeches ; it was printed on hand- 
bills ; and it saved the ship for half a century. " Old Iron- 
sides " was taken to the new Charlestown navy yard, and a 
few years later she was thoroughly repaired. Even when 
the day of wooden war ships was past forever, the" Consti- 
tution " did not go out of commission for the last time until 
about fifty years after Holmes had penned his stirring lines. 



i6o 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



Apparently the law did not tempt Holmes to persever- 
ance ; and before he had been out of college two years he 
abandoned it finally, to take up the study of medicine — 
his grandfather's profession. Although he had already 
written much, and was helping to edit a miscellany, he 
seems never to have thought of authorship as his calling. 




Holmes's Birthplace, Cambridg-e. Mass. 



Having made his choice of a profession, Holmes devoted 
himself to it — at first in Boston, and then in Europe; 
making the voyage chiefly that he might study medicine 
in Paris, where the best instruction was to be obtained 
at that time. ** I was in Europe," he wrote half a century 
later, ** about two years and a half, from April, 1833, to 
October, 1835. I sailed in the packet ship 'Philadelphia' 
from New York to Portsmouth, where we arrived after a 
passage of twenty-four days. ... I then crossed the 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLiMES 



i6i 



Channel to Havre, from which I went to Paris. In the 
spring and summer of 1834 I made my principal visit to 
England and Scotland. There were other excursions to 
the Rhine and to Holland, to Switzerland and to Italy. 
. . . I returned in the packet-ship ' Utica/ sailing from 
Havre, and reaching New York after a passage of forty- 
two days." 

He received the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1836, 
being then twenty-seven years old ; and in that year he 
also published his first volume of poems. Nothing of 
Dr. Holmes's has been more popular than the ''Last Leaf*' 
contained in this early collection, and none has ^more richly 
deserved to please by its rhythmic beauty, and by its ex- 
quisite blending of humor and pathos, so sympathetically 
intertwined that we feel the lonely sadness of the old man 
even while we are smiling at his quaintness so delicately 
portrayed. Dr. Holmes was like Bryant (who composed 
*' Thanatopsis " and the ''Lines to a Waterfowl" long 
before he was twenty) in that he early attained his full 
development as a poet. Although both of them wrote 
many verses in later life, nothing of theirs excelled these 
poems of their youth. In their maturity they did not fall 
off, but neither did they deepen or broaden ; and "Thana- 
topsis " on the one side, and the "Last Leaf" on the 
other, are as strong and characteristic as anything either 
poet was ever to write throughout all his long life. What 
Bryant was, what Holmes was, in his first volume of poems, 
each was to the end of his career. 

To neither of them was literature a livelihood. Bryant 
was first a lawyer and then a journalist. Holmes was first 
a practicing physician and then a teacher of medicine. 
He won three prizes for dissertations on medical themes, 
and these essays were published together in 1838. In 1839 



l62 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

he was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at 
Dartmouth and the next year he married Miss Ameha 
Lee Jackson. Shortly afterward he resigned the professor- 
ship at Dartmouth and resumed practice in Boston. He 
worked hard at his profession, and he contributed freely to 
its literature — publishing, for example, in 1842 his trench- 
ant discussion of ** Homeopathy and its Kindred Delu- 
sions." Then, in 1847, he went back to Harvard, having 
been appointed professor of anatomy and physiology — a 
position which he was to hold with great distinction for 
thirty-five years. 

The most of the prose which Dr. Holmes wrote at this 
period of his life was upon medical topics ; and whenever 
he had anything to say upon other than professional sub- 
jects he generally said it in verse. Although he was for a 
while a frequent lecturer in the lyceums of New England, 
following in the footsteps of Emerson, his literary reputa- 
tion until he was nearly fifty was due almost wholly to his 
poems. This reputation was highest in Massachusetts, 
and he was the bard of Boston especially, being called upon 
whenever the three-hilled city needed a copy of verses for 
an occasion of public interest, a dinner, or a funeral, or 
the visit of a distinguished foreigner. He always acquitted 
himself acceptably and often brilliantly ; and he rarely 
refused to provide the few lines of rime appropriate to 
the event. As he himself humorously put it in one of his 
later occasional poems : — 

Fm a florist in verse, and what would people say 
If I came to a banquet without my bouquet ? 

Then, when Holmes was forty-eight years old, an age at 
which most men have stiffened themselves into habits, he 
showed the flexibility of his talent by writing one of the 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 163 

wisest and wittiest prose books in the English language. 
The Atlantic Monthly was estabhshed in the fall of 1857, 
and Lowell made it a condition of his acting as editor that 
Dr. Holmes should be a contributor. Therefore it was 
that the first number of the new magazine contained the 
opening pages of the *' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,'' 
which every reader followed with delight month after 
month, until at last the book was completed and published 
by itself in the fall of 1858. Since then it is rather as a 
writer of prose than as a writer of verse that Dr. Holmes 
has been most highly esteemed. 

The ** Autocrat of the Breakfast Table " is a most origi- 
nal book; but it is not especially original in form, for it 
is not very unlike the ** Spectator" of Addison and Steele, 
wherein a group of characters is described, and their 
sayings and doings are duly recorded. In the American 
book the group of characters meets at the early morning 
meal, and one of them — the Autocrat himself — does most 
of the talking. The other figures are lightly sketched 
— some of them are merely suggested; and even at the 
very end there is but the thinnest thread of a story. 

The real originality of Dr. Holmes's work lay deeper 
than the external form; it lay in the unaffected sim- 
plicity and sincerity of the Autocrat's talk. He seemed 
rather to be chatting with himself than conversing with 
others; and no such talk had yet fallen from any American 
lips — none so cheerful with humor, so laden with thought, 
so mellow with knowledge, so ripe with experience. The 
reader was borne along by the current of it, unresisting, 
smiling often, laughing sometimes, and absorbing always, 
even if unconsciously, broad and high thoughts about life. 

So ample a store of humor — and of good humor — had 
Dr. Holmes, so well filled a reservoir of sense and of 



l64 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

common sense, that he had an abundance of material for 
other volumes like the *' Autocrat." In i860 he published 
the ** Professor at the Breakfast Table," and in 1872 the 
**Poet at the Breakfast Table," thus completing the tril- 
ogy. Although these two later volumes have not all the 
freshness of their predecessor, they are inferior only to it ; 
they have the same wholesome spirit, the same sanity, the 
same sunny sagacity. And these are also the quahties 
which characterize his last volume of prose, *' Over the 
Teacups," issued in 1890, when he was eighty-one years 
old. 

In all these books there is the precious flavor of actual 
conversation, the table talk of a broad, liberal, thoughtful 
man, full of fancy and abounding in humor — a man who 
could chat with countless readers without raising his voice, 
speaking softly and easily as though he were seated in his 
own chimney corner. 

Various essays and lighter prose pieces, contributed from 
time to time to the magazines, he gathered together in 
1863 under the apt title of "^^ Soundings from the Atlantic!' 
In more than one of these he discussed subjects of every- 
day life from the point of view of a shrewd and thoughtful 
physician, avoiding technicalities, and yet using his techni- 
cal knowledge to help him explain clearly the problem he 
had in hand. 

In 1883, when he made a final revision of all his writ- 
ings, the best of the papers in this book, with others 
written afterward, he brought out together as '* Pages 
from an Old Volume of Life." At this time he selected 
and corrected also a volume of " Medical Essays." C'ever 
as both these books are, with a cleverness of their own, 
and of a kind no other author possessed, they added but 
little to Dr. Holmes's reputation. And perhaps it is not 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



165 



unfair to say that this reputation, raised to its highest by 
the Breakfast Table series, was but Uttle bettered either 
by the three novels or by the two biographies he wrote 
after the success of the *' Autocrat " tempted him to other 
ventures in prose. 

The three novels were ''Elsie Venner," which was pub- 
lished in 1861 ; the ''Guardian Angel," which followed 




Holmes's Summer Residence, Beverly Farms, Mass. 



in 1867; and "A Mortal Antipathy,'* which came last in 
1885. All three of these attempts at story-telling are 
interesting because they are the work of Dr. Holmes. No 
one of them is a masterpiece of fiction. He had not 
received the gift of story-telling in as full a proportion as 
many novelists without a tithe of his ability. In his hands 
the novel is rarely dramatic ; it is rather an elaboration of 
the essay and the character sketch. The teller of the story 



l66 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

is more important than the story itself, and his comments 
are more interesting than his characters. 

The strange subjects he chose were suggested to him 
by his study of his profession ; and the themes of both 
*' Elsie Venner " and '' A Mortal Antipathy " are abnormal. 
Yet in writing fiction, as in writing verses, Dr. Holmes's 
extraordinary facility stood him in good stead. His stories, 
whatever their deficiencies in other respects, have all the 
shrewdness and the insight which always characterize his 
handling of human character. 

The earlier of the two biographies was the memoir of 
Motley, published in 1878, within two years after the his- 
torian's death. Dr. Holmes was one of Motley's oldest 
comrades, and he told the story of his friend's life and 
labors with his accustomed skill, although perhaps his tone 
was a little too apologetic. In the second biography, the 
memoir of Emerson, pubUshed in 1884, he saw no reason 
to be on the defensive ; and this life is therefore more sat- 
isfactory than its predecessor. 

Dr. Holmes had, of course, a complete understanding of 
Emerson's wit, and a full appreciation of Emerson's intelli- 
gence, although he had perhaps not so firm a grasp of 
Emerson's philosophy. Yet the book is delightful The 
sage of Concord is presented with the sharpest clearness ; 
he is made real to us by abundant anecdote ; his works 
are analyzed with the utmost acumen ; and his career 
and his character are summed up with absolute sympathy. 
Both of these biographies were scientifically planned and 
proportioned, for Dr. Holmes was always the neatest of 
workmen. 

In nothing was he neater than in his characterization of 
his contemporaries, not only in these two memoirs, but 
more particularly in the occasional poems which his sue- 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 167 

cess as a prose writer did not prevent him from producing. 
Of Emerson he asked : — 

Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song, 
Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong? 
He seems a winged Franklin, sweetly wise, 
Born to unlock the secrets of the skies. 

Even happier is his summary of Whittier's character: — 

So fervid, so simple, so loving, so pure. 
We hear but one strain, and our verdict is sure! 
Thee cannot elude us— no further we search — 
Tis holy George Herbert cut loose from his church. 

And when Lowell went abroad as minister of the United 
States to Spain, Holmes rimed this pertinent inquiry : — 

Do you know whom we send you. Hidalgos of Spain? 
Do you know your old friends when you see them again? 
Hosea was Sancho! You Dons of Madrid, 
But Sancho that wielded the lance of the Cid ! 

It was the men of Massachusetts that Holmes cele- 
brated in song most freely and most frequently, and al- 
though he wrote stirring stanzas of appeal to the whole 
United States, west and east, when the life of the nation was 
in danger, it was in the little city of Boston that his spirit 
resided oftenest. He it was who declared that '' Boston 
State House is the hub of the solar system," and that 
*'you couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the 
tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar." He 
himself was a Bostonian of the strictest sect ; he might 
make fun of the little city, but he loved it all the better 
for every joke he cracked upon it. 

As we turn the pages of the three volumes into which he 
finally collected all his verse, it is impossible not to be 
struck by the very large proportion of it which is local 



i68 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



in its themes, even if it is not local in its interest. He 
responded loyally to every call Boston might make upon 
him, and Boston repaid him with homage and with high 
praise. It was in Boston that a great public breakfast 
was given to him in honor of his seventieth birthday. 
That was in 1879; and three years later he resigned his 
professorship. 

In 1886 he went over to Europe for the second time, 
almost exactly fifty years after his first visit. He spent 
the summer in England and France, and he seems to 

,^^^ Z-^^/^ ^^ ^:^^;^zL.-7^ ^izZT^z^ 



have had a very good time indeed, for he kept in age 
the youthful faculty of enjoyment. From the members 
of his own profession in England, from the men of 
letters in London, from the fashionable society of Great 
Britain, Dr. Holmes received the heartiest welcome ; and 
he was the lion of the London season. He took notes of 
his travels, recording his observations of men and of man- 
ners ; and on his return home these jottings were written 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



169 



out, and published the next year as "Our Hundred Days 
in Europe." It is an easy and a pleasing narrative, rich in 
the flavor of the author's own personaUty. 

After he had settled down again in Boston, Dr. Holmes 
continued to write both in prose and in verse. He kept his 
faculties fully until he had long passed the age of four- 
score. His final volume of poems, published in 1888, was 
appropriately called "Before the Curfew," just as Long- 
fellow and Whittier (also looking to the end) had named 
their last volumes "In the Harbor" and "At Sundown." 
Yet after the poems in this collection Holmes wrote those 
scattered through the pages of " Over the Teacups," 
which was published in 1890. Four years later he died, 
on October 7, 1894 — more than sixty years since he had 
first made himself widely known to his countrymen by the 
ringing appeal for "Old Ironsides." 

Although Holmes had written poems of a wide popu- 
larity — "Dorothy Q.," "Grandmother's Story of Bunker 
Hill Battle," the "Wonderful One-Hoss Shay," and the 
"Broomstick Train"- — probably his prose will endure 
longer than his verse. For his chief quality was intelli- 
gence, and poetry demands rather imagination. His versa- 
tility, too, was perhaps more apparent than real, because it 
was but the result of the dominant intelligence directed into 
different channels. The force of this intelligence was 
indisputable ; and Holmes could make it masquerade as 
wisdom and as knowledge, as shrewdness and as wit — and 
even as poetry. It is seen at its best in the " Autocrat of 
the Breakfast Table," and that is why that book is better 
in kind and in degree than any of its fellov/s. 

With this intelligence Holmes had also absolute sanity 
— and yet he was not intolerant even toward the bores 
and the cranks. He had abundant humor, and that helped 



I/O AMERICAN LITERATURE 

to sweeten his life and to broaden his influence. Perhaps 
a certain softening of the asperity of religious debate is 
due to his preaching and to his practice. To the whole 
United States he set an example of kindliness and of 
gentleness, associated with sagacity and with strength. 
He himself was an exemplar of the amenities he pro- 
claimed. He was the last to survive of the great New 
England group of authors, Emerson, Longfellow, Haw- 
thorne, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell, which followed, and 
in some ways surpassed, the earlier New York group, 
Irving, Cooper, and Bryant. 

Questions. — In what ways did Holmes give indication, even before 
he completed his education, of a decided literary bent? 

What events showed the attainment by Holmes of maturity in the 
two kinds of writing in which he was destined to become famous ? 

In what department of letters did Holmes first make a reputation? 

Describe the series of works by which that reputation w^as at once 
shifted in field and enlarged in extent. 

Compare Holmes's achievements as a novelist with his work as a 
biographer. 

Compare geographically the sympathies of Holmes with those of 
Whittier and Longfellow. 

What events may be mentioned as showing how he w^as appreciated 
both at home and abroad? 

Is Holmes's fame most likely to be founded hereafter on his prose 
or on his poetry ? Why ? 

Note. — The only complete edition of Holmes's works is that published by 
Houghton Mifflin (14 vols.). The Cambridge edition contains all the poems in a 
single volume. " Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle," etc., and " My Hunt 
after the Captain," etc., can be had as separate numbers of the Riverside Literature 
series. 

The authorized biography is that by John T. Morse, Jr. (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see Lowell's " Fable for Critics " (Houghton Mifflin) ; E. C. Sted- 
man in his " Poets of- America" (Houghton Mifflin) ; T. W. Higginson's "Old 
Cambridge " (Macmillan) ; W. D. Howells's " Literary Friends and Acquaint- 
ance " (Harper); John Burroughs's "Rereading of Books" in his "Literary 
Values" (Houghton Mifflin) ; and H. C. Lodge's " Early Memories" (Scribner). 




XIII HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



The little town of Concord has many titles to remem- 
brance. There *'the embattled farmers stood and fired 
the shot heard round the world;" there Emerson wrote 
*' Nature" ; there Hawthorne wrote the ''Mosses from an 
Old Manse " ; and there was born and lived and died Henry 
D. Thoreau, an author of even a more marked individuality 
than either Emerson or Hawthorne. This man was in 
many ways a true American ; he was free from allegiance 
to Europe; he was possessed by the democratic spirit. 
On the other hand, he was content with a mere living ; he 

171 



172 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



had no wish to make money ; he had no desire to get on in 
the world ; he preferred to Umit his own wants and not to 
be a servant to his own possessions. 

Henry D. Thoreau was born on July 12, 181 7. He 
went to school in Concord and in Boston ; and he entered 
Harvard College when he was sixteen, graduating in 1837. 
He seems to have been a conscientious student at college ; 
and he was attracted especially by Greek literature. 

Through life he retained 
a liking for Greek modes 
of thought and of ex- 
pression. 

Thoreau's family made 
pencils for a living, and 
this trade Henry mas- 
tered easily. He was 
always swift to pick up a 
handicraft. He worked 
also as a carpenter, and 
occasionally he got a 
job of surveying. 

It was on a piece of 
land belonging to Emer- 
son, a bit of woodland 
on the margin of Walden Pond, that Thoreau built himself 
a shanty in 1845. In this little hut, a mile from any neigh- 
bor, he dwelt for two years and two months. He took up 
with this way of living because he wished to '* transact 
some private business," so he said. What he wanted 
was solitude in which to write out a book recording his 
excursion of a week down the Concord and the Merrimac 
rivers. Then when his business was transacted he went 
back to civilization — never having been out of touch with 




Hut on Walden Pond 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



173 



it for more than a few days at a time. '' I left the woods 
for as good a reason as I went there," he declared. 

'' A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers " was 
published in 1849, ^he account of a journey in which the 
narrator talked of himself and of his feelings and of his 
thoughts quite as much as he spoke of the places he 
passed and of the people he met. Perhaps because of 
the strangeness of his frank egotism, the book did not 
then please the public ; and when Thoreau settled finally 
with the pubHsher, four years after it had appeared, he 
took back at least two thirds of the first edition. Without, 
complaint he carried the unsold copies upstairs to the 
garret and then made the characteristically witty entry in 
his journal, ^' I have now a library of nearly nine hundred 
volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." 

Five years later Thoreau issued his second book, the 
only other volume of his abundant writing to be printed 
during his own life. From the journal he had kept 
while he was living in the hut he drew the material for 
**Walden." This is the work by which Thoreau is best 
known now and in which his doctrine of life is declared 
most clearly. The key to Thoreau's philosophy is to be 
found in his saying that ''a man is rich in proportion to 
the number of things which he can afford to let alone." 
'' I went to the woods," so he tells us, '* because I wished to 
live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, 
and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and 
not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Some of the readers of ''Walden" did not seize the 
point of this declaration. Whittier wrote to a friend when 
the book was just published, that he found it ** capital 
reading," but that '' the practical moral .of it seems to be 
that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck 



174 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

he can live as cheaply as that quadruped ; but after all, 
for me, I prefer walking on two legs." Now this is not 
quite fair, for Thoreau was not sinking himself into a 
woodchuck when he tried plain living that he might have 
high thinking ; and *' Walden " is a most wholesome warn- 
ing to all those who are willing to let life itself be smoth- 
ered out of them by the luxuries they have allowed to be- 
come necessaries. This is why '* Walden " has been called 
one of the few books of American authorship which it is 
worth while for an American to read regularly every 
year. 

Thoreau .never married; and a man without a wife and 
without a child can take chances and simplify his life in 
a way impossible to the man who has given hostages to 
fortune. Thoreau had little incentive to struggle and 
to take part in any race for wealth. His wants were 
always simple and few. If he had but food and warmth 
and shelter and a book at hand and a friend within an 
hour's walk he was content. '' The cost of a thing," he 
wrcfte, **is the amount of what I will call life which is 
required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the 
long run." 

In the simplification of his own existence Thoreau was 
sincere : he followed the bent of his nature. Therefore 
was Emerson able to write of him after his death, *' he 
was bred to no profession ; he never married ; he lived 
alone ; he never went to church ; he never voted ; he 
refused to pay a tax to the State ; he ate no flesh, he drank 
no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco ; and, though a 
naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun." 

He developed consumption, and long before the end 
came at last he knew that it would come in time. He suf- 
fered especially from sleeplessness, but he faced his fate 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



175 



with fortitude. *' His patience was unfailing; assuredly 
he knew not aught save resignation ; he did mightily cheer 
and console those whose strength was less." He died on 
May 6, 1862, and was buried in the ''Sleepy Hollow," 
where Hawthorne and Emerson have since joined him. 

Since his death, volume after volume of his writings has 
been published, some collected from magazines and others 
extracted from the journal he had kept for thirty years. 
Two of these books have a certain unity ; one of them is 
his account of his pioneering adventures in the '' Maine 
Woods," published in 1864; and the other is the somewhat 
similar record of the several walks he took along the sandy 
shores of '*Cape Cod," published in 1865. 

Perhaps it is as a naturalist that Thoreau has the widest 
reputation. He had an extraordinary familiarity with 
sylvan life, and the shy creatures of the field and the forest 
lost some of their shyness with him. He is said to have 
drawn a woodchuck from its hole by the tail and to have 
caught a fish in the lake with only his hand. '' He knew 
how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on," so 
Emerson tells us, '' until the bird, the reptile, the fish, 
which had retired from him, should come back and resume 
its habits — nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him 
and watch him." He was a chief of the poet naturalists, 
and he was not only intimate with nature but friendly. 
One who knew him said that he talked *' about Nature just 
as if she'd been born and brought up in Concord." 

He was always more poet than naturalist, for his obser- 
vation, interesting as it ever may be, is rarely novel. It is 
his way of putting what he has seen that takes us rather 
than any freshness in the observation itself. His sentences 
have sometimes a Greek perfection ; they have the fresh- 
ness, the sharpness, and the truth which we find so often 







^^-7. 









-e^^^gb 






■^ — . 




176 



HENRY DAVID THOREAU 



177 



in the writings of the Greeks who came early into literature, 
before everything had been seen and said. Thoreau had 
a Yankee skill with his fingers, and he could whittle 
the English language in like manner ; he had also a Greek 
faculty of packing an old truth into an unexpected 
sentence. 

Questions. — Speak of the contrasting traits of the third in the trio 
of American authors who contributed to make Concord famous. 

Show how certain qualities of Thoreau's style as a writer may be 
traced to the circumstances of his education 

What is the history of Thoreau's first book ? How did his second 
one grow out of this one? 

Mention some of the circumstances which seem to justify Thoreau 
in his attempts to live up to his theory. 

Characterize the work of Thoreau with reference to subject matter 
and expression. 



Note. — The only complete edition of Thoreau's works is that published by 
Houghton Mifflin (11 vols.). I he "Succession of Forest Trees," etc., with bio- 
graphical sketch by Emerson, can be had as a separate number of the Riverside 
Literature series (Houghton Mifflin). 

There is a biography by F. B. Sanborn (Goodspeed). 

For criticism, see , Emerson's sketch; Lowell in "My Study Windows" 
(Houghton Mifflin) ; Mr. T. W. Higginson in " Short Studies of American 
Authors " (Longmans) ; R. L. Stevenson in " Famihar Studies of Men and Books " 
(Scribner) ; John Burroughs in " Indoor Studies " (Houghton Mifflin). 




XIV JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 

The Lowells have always held an honored place in the 
local history of New England. One member of the family 
introduced cotton-spinning into the United States ; and 
for him the town of Lowell in Massachusetts is named. 
Another left money to found in Boston the course of 
lectures known as the Lowell Institute. The most dis- 
tinguished of them all was James Russell Lowell, who 
was born in 1819 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Feb- 
ruary 22 — the birthday of the most distinguished of all 
Americans. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 179 

His father was a Boston clergyman of high character 
and fine training, and his mother, who was descended from 
an Orkney family, had an ardent appreciation of poetry 
and romance, which she w^as able to transmit to her chil- 
dren. The boy grew to manhood in Cambridge, then 
little more than a straggling village. There he went to a 
dame school : — 

Propped on the marsh, a dwelling now, I see, 

The humble schoolhouse of my A, B, C, 

Where well-drilled urchins, each behind his tire, 

Waited in ranks the wished command to fire ; 

Then all together, when the signal came, 

Discharged their a-b abs against the dame. 

She, 'mid the volleyed learning, firm and calm, 

Patted the furloughed ferule on her palm, 

And, to our wonder, could divine at once 

Who flashed the pan, and who was dow^nright dunce. 

At the age of eight or nine he was sent as a day pupil 
to a boarding school in Cambridge, where the boys were 
made to work hard. To the training and to the instruc- 
tions received at this school Lowell owed much in after 
life. It happened that two or three of the letters he 
wrote then to a brother away from home have been kept, 
and they show that he was already fond of books, often 
thinking about them and always glad to get them. In one 
letter written before he was ten he tells his brother that 
their mother has just given him three volumes of Scott's 
'^ Tales of a Grandfather," and he declares ''I have got 
quite a library.'* 

At the age of fifteen he entered Harvard. This was 
in 1834, and in 1836 Longfellow came to the college to 
teach literature, succeeding Ticknor, the historian of Span- 
ish literature — as Lowell was to succeed Longfellow a 



l8o AMERICAN LITERATURE 

score- of years later. At Harvard Lowell was not a dili- 
gent student ; he liked better to read what interested him 
than to master the tasks set before him by the college 
authorities. Spenser was already a favorite poet of his, 
and he seems early to have entered on the study of Dante, 
which was to be a life-long pleasure to him. 

He began to rime himself, and in his junior year he 
wrote the anniversary poem. He was made editor of 
the college magazine in his senior year. He appears to 
have been popular with his classmates and he was chosen 
to write the class poem. But he had so neglected certain 
of the prescribed studies of the college that he was sus- 
pended for several months, and as the term of suspension 
extended over class-day, he was not able himself to deliver 
the poem he had written. He had it printed for his com- 
panions, although he held it in too slight esteem ever to 
include it among the poems of his maturity. 

After his graduation he thought of entering the Divinity 
School, but he decided at last to study law. Although he 
was on the very verge of giving it up twenty times, he 
persevered and received his degree of Bachelor of Laws 
in 1840. He opened an office in Boston, but it is doubt- 
ful whether he ever had even that first client whom he 
was afterward to describe in a humorous sketch. With 
no great liking for the law as a means of livelihood, he 
finally abandoned it, as Holmes had done only a few years 
earlier. 

Lowell had become engaged to Miss Maria White, who 
was to influence the whole course of his life. The first 
result of his happy love was the publication in 1841 of a 
volume of poems, some of which had been printed already 
in the magazines, and others were hasty and crude rimes 
which he kept out of later editions of his poems — just as 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL i8l 

Whittier rejected his own early verses. Lowell was barely 
twenty-two when this book appeared, but there was more 
than one poem in it which gave high promise of his fu- 
ture. In addition to his ability, he had a deep love for 
letters ; and this it was which led him a year later to start 
a monthly magazine. In his ardor and in his inexperience 
he made this periodical too exclusively literary to attain 
a wide popularity; and, unfortunately, after three numbers 
it came to an end suddenly, leaving its projectors in debt. 

In his class poem Lowell had shown himself lacking in 
sympathy with the Transcendentalists and with the Aboli- 
tionists ; and until he met Miss White his interests and 
his ambitions were almost wholly literary. Under her 
influence his higher nature developed and he came to have 
a strong feeling for the fellow human beings who were 
held in bondage. He swiftly saw that in real life there 
were causes to be fought far better worth the struggle 
than any mere craving for personal fame. His love for 
letters never lessened, but it was linked thereafter to the 
love for human freedom. 

He was married at last in 1844, in which year he 
brought out a revised edition of his poems. A few 
months later he gathered from the magazines certain 
prose criticisms, chiefly about the older English poets — 
criticisms which he thought so lightly of in later years 
that he did not allow them to be included in his collected 
works. And about this time he was a frequent contribu- 
tor to the Pennsylvania Freema7iy the antislavery journal 
formerly edited by Whittier. 

Settled at Cambridge in Elmwood (the beautiful old 
house where he had been born), happily married, sup- 
porting himself by his writings and enlisted in the ser- 
vice of a cause which he had taken to heart, Lowell was 



1 82 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



able to conquer his native indolence. He undertook to 
contribute every week, either in prose or in verse, to one 
of the ablest of the antislavery journals ; and he kept this 
agreement for nearly four years, from 1846 to 1850. These 
were four years of unrest and excitement throughout the 
world; and here in the United States the discussion over 
slavery became more and more acute. 




Elmwood 



Chiefly to gain an increase of territory for the expansion 
of slavery, this country was involved in a war with Mexico 
over the admission of Texas. Although it is easy enough 
now to see that without the new lands the proper expan- 
sion of the United States was not possible, it was hard to 
foresee this then. What was obvious at that time was 
that both the motives and the methods of those who were 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 183 

urging us into the Mexican war were apparently unworthy. 
This is what Lowell discerned with his usual keenness; 
and no one attacked those responsible for the Mexican war 
more sharply than he or more effectively. 

The weapon he chose was satiric verse written in the 
homely dialect of the New England farmer. With pun- 
gent humor and in stanzas that had a sharp flavor of the 
soil, ''Hosea Biglow" made fun of the attempts to rouse his 
fellow-citizens to military fervor. His stinging lines, which 
scorched themselves into the memory, were accompanied 
by the prose comments of ''Parson Wilbur," who repre- 
sented the other side of the New England character. While 
the clergyman was glad to air his culture and his classics, 
he served admirably to set off the simple frankness of 
the Yankee youth. 

That the lyrics of Hosea should linger in the ears of 
those who heard them, Lowell took care to give to each 
a swinging rhythm and often also a catching refrain. 
When at last the scattered '' Biglow Papers " were col- 
lected into a volume in 1848, the author, just to show 
that the New England dialect was serviceable for other 
things than satire, added to the book a Yankee idyl, ''The 
CourtinV* one of the most beautifully natural love epi- 
sodes in all English poetry. 

During these same years of political turmoil while he 
was writing the " Biglow Papers " one after another, 
Lowell produced another satire of a very different kind, 
the " Fable for Critics," which was also published in 
1848 ; it was purely literary in its outlook ; it was a con- 
sideration in verse of the state of American literature at 
the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. It con- 
tained a gallery of portraits of the American authors then 
prominent ; and in every portrait the characteristic features 



1 84 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

of the original were seized with swift insight and repro- 
duced with sharp vigor. 

It is a proof of Lowell's excellence of judgment and of 
his independence of attitude, that the opinions he expressed 
about the leading American authors of that time coincide 
closely with that on which the best criticism is now agreed 
sixty years later. And the rattling lines of the poem are 
as readable now as when they were first written, with their 
scattering fire of verbal jokes, of ingenious rimes, and of 
personal witticisms. As the *' Biglow Papers" is the 
firmest and the finest political satire yet written in the 
United States, so the ''Fable for Critics" is the clearest 
and most truthful literary satire. 

Nor did these two satires withdraw him wholly from the 
higher poetry on which his heart was set. And in this 
same year, 1848, he sent forth also the ''Vision of Sir 
Launfal," his first attempt at telling a story in verse. It 
is the best of all his serious poems ; perhaps loftier in 
conception and more careful in execution. His habit then, 
as always, was to brood over the subject he wished to treat 
in verse, to fill himself with it, to work himself up to a 
white heat over it, and finally to write it out at a single sit- 
ting if possible. He rarely revised and his verse lacked 
finish and polish, though it never wanted force. It was at 
this time that he told Longfellow he meant to give up 
poetry because he could " not write slowly enough." 

His poetry also suffered from another failing of his. He 
was not content to set forth beauty only and to let the reader 
discover a moral for himself. Like Longfellow sometimes 
and like Whittier often, Lowell insisted unduly on the bur- 
den of his song. And he knew his own defect and wrote 
later in life, " I shall never be a poet till I get out of the 
pulpit, and New England was all meetinghouse when I 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



185 



was growing up." In the *' Fable for Critics "(which was 
published without his own name as author, and in which 
he thought it best to include himself among the poets 
satirized) he thus judges his own efforts: — 

There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb — 

With a whole bale of isms tied together with rime ; 

He might get on alone, spite of brambles and boulders^ 

But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders ; 

The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching 

Till he learns the distinction Hwixt singing and preaching ; 

His lyre has some chords that would ring pretty well, 

But he'd rather by half make a drum of the shell, 

And rattle away till he's old as Methusalem, 

At the head of a march to the last new Jerusalem. 

During these years when Lowell was making his way as 
a poet and when he was happy in his work, the health of 
his wife was slowly fading. For her sake they went to 
Europe in 185 1, returning the following year. In spite of 
all that could be done for her she died in October, 1853. 
As it happened, a daughter was born to Longfellow on the 
day of the death of Lowell's wife ; and in the lovely poem 
of the *'Two Angels" the elder poet tried to console the 
younger. 

Angels of Life and Death alike are His ; 

Without His leave they pass no threshold o'er : 
Who, then, would wish or dare, believing this, 

Against His messengers to shut the door? 

In the fall of 1854 Lowell delivered a series of lectures 
on the English poets. These addresses, given at the 
Lowell Institute in Boston, revealed all the richness and 
strength of his culture and displayed the resources of his 
critical faculty. They proved that he was the American 
critic who had at once the keenest insight and the widest 



i86 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



equipment. Almost immediately after he had made these 
discourses and entirely without his own solicitation he was 
offered the professorship of modern languages at Harvard, 
which Longfellow had just resigned. He accepted this 
arduous and honorable position in the oldest American 
university, and he was allowed two years' leave of absence 
to spend in Europe in study. So it was in the spring of 
1857 that Lowell became a professor of Harvard — just 
ten years after Dr. Holmes had begun his own connection 
with that institution. 

With Dr. Holmes he was soon brought into closer con- 
tact. A new American magazine was planned, to contain 
contributions more particularly from the New England 
group of writers ; and the editorship was offered to Lowell. 
The first number of the Atlantic which appeared in 1857 
contained the opening paper of the " Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table"; and for four years Lowell edited this 
• magazine, toiling faithfully, writing abundantly himself, 
generally on political themes, and encouraging new writers 
of ability. After he resigned the editorship of the Atlan- 
tic he became for a while one of the conductors of the 
North Americaii Review^ the venerable quarterly to which 
Bryant had contributed ^*Thanatopsis '' nearly half a cen- 
tury before. Under the title of "Fireside Travels" he 
pubHshed in 1864 a volume of his prose papers collected 
chiefly from the magazines. 

But long before this peaceful prose appeared, Lowell had 
been moved again to express in verse his feelings and his 
thoughts on the times. " Hosea Biglow" had come into 
being during the Mexican war ; and it was the Civil War 
which evoked him once more. Love of country was the 
core of Loweirs character and the outbreak of the struggle 
between the states stirred his nature to its depths. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



187 



The second series of the '* Biglow Papers," written at 
intervals during the war, met with even wider popular 
approval than the first series ; and certainly the stinging 
stanzas of ** Jonathan to John" are unsurpassed in all 
English satire. When this second series of the " Biglow 
Papers" was collected into a volume in 1867 Lowell 
prefixed to it a consideration of the past, the present, and 
the future of the EngUsh language in America — a paper 
which had scholarship equal to its humor and a sweetness 
of temper equal to both — a paper to be read by all who 
want to understand how it is that we Americans own a 
whole and undivided half of the English language. 

In i86g Lowell made a collection of his graver verse, 
** Under the Willows," in which he included his more seri- 
ous poems of the war. Among them were the thrilling 
lines of the "Washers of the Shroud," and the noble and 
lofty ode recited at the Harvard Commemoration of those 
of her students who had fallen in battle for the right — the 
ode in which the poet set forth in imperishable phrase the 
true character of Abraham Lincoln. And in this same 
year Lowell also put forth the longest of his single poems, 
the ** Cathedral," a work in which the parts are greater 
than the whole, and which is rather Gothic than Greek in 
conception and execution. It is elevated in its purpose, and 
yet there is an occasional obtrusion of prankish humor not 
unlike the grotesque faces which grin down on the visitor 
to the actual cathedral at Chartres. 

From the many critical papers which he had written, 
chiefly for the periodicals he had edited, and which were 
often founded on courses of college lectures, Lowell made 
a first choice in 1870, and published ''Among my Books," 
a volume of prose essays in criticism. The year after, 
another volume appeared called *' My Study Windows"; 



1 88 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



and a few years later came yet another, the second series 
of ^'Among my Books." In the final edition of his writings 
the contents of these three volumes has been rearranged 
somewhat. Among them were the criticisms of the great 
poets Dante, Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth ; 
cordial papers on Lowell's own favorites, Dryden, Les- 
sing, and Keats ; and pungent yet mellow essays '^ On a 
Certain Condescension in Foreigners," on ''My Garden 
Acquaintance," and on '' A Good Word for Winter." 

As these volumes proved, Lowell was the foremost of all 
American critics of literature. He had knowledge and 
wisdom, culture and sagacity. His writing has the lei- 
surely amplitude of the scholar and the sharp thrust of the 
wit. The gift of the winged phrase was his ; and no man 
of our time ever packed truth oftener into an epigram. 
He had also the wide and deep acquaintance with literature 
which is the best backbone of criticism. So fine was his 
scholarship, and so broad his cultivation, that he was wholly 
devoid of petty pedantries ; he had too sure a sense of pro- 
portion to confuse trifling facts with truths of real impor- 
tance. 

Lowell had enjoyed heartily his own frequent reading of 
the works of the great authors he wrote about, and he was 
able to convey some of this enjoyment to his own readers, 
and to explain to them the reasons for his liking. His 
favorite of all was the mighty Florentine poet Dante, 
whom he steadily studied from early life. Indeed, the 
advice he gave to young men seeking culture was to find 
the great writer whom they most appreciated and to give 
themselves to the constant perusal of this great writer, 
growing up to him slowly and discovering gradually that 
to understand him adequately would force them sooner or 
later to learn many of the things best worth learning. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 189 

When the time came to celebrate the centenary of the 
chief events of the Revolution, Lowell was the poet to whom 
the American people turned to have their thoughts and 
their sentiments voiced for them in verse ; and Lowell 
delivered an ode at the centenary of the fight at Concord 
Bridge, and another at the centenary of Washington's tak- 
ing command of the American army at Cambridge just 
before the siege of Boston, and a third on the Fourth of 
July, 1876. In this same year these ''Three Memorial 
Poems " were published together in a single volume. 

The next year he was called to the service of the coun- 
try whose foundation he had been celebrating in song. 
He was sent in 1877 as American Minister to Spain, 
where another man of letters, Washington Irving, had 
preceded him half a century before. In 1880 he was 
transferred from Madrid to London. 

No American minister ever made himself more welcome 
among a foreign people than Lowell made himself among 
the British. And his popularity was not due to any at- 
tempt to please their prejudices ; Lowell abated not a jot 
or tittle of his Americanism — rather on occasion did he 
accentuate it. In sending him to Great Britain the United 
States sent the best we had. Our kin across the sea were 
quick to understand the opportunity offered to them ; and 
by their request Lowell delivered in England many public 
addresses, some of them formal orations, while others were 
but offhand after dinner speeches. But whatever the occa- 
sion, Lowell was equal to it, never more amply than when 
he went to Birmingham to make an exposition of the theory 
and practice of '* Democracy " in America. Nowhere 
more plainly than in England was Lowell's Americanism 
seen to be ingrained. With him patriotism was almost 
a passion. 



IQO AMERICAN LITERATURE 

He remained in England three years and then returned 
home, and Dr. Hohnes greeted him with a copy of verses, 
in which he asked, — 

By what enchantments, what alluring arts, 

Our truthful James led captive British hearts, — 

Whether his shrewdness made their statesmen halt; 

Or if his learning found their dons at fault, 

Or if his virtue was a strange surprise, 

Or if his wit flung sawdust in their eyes, — 

Like honest Yankees we can simply guess ; 

But that he did it, all must needs confess. 

England herself without a blush may claim 

Her only conqueror since the Norman came. 

After his return to his native land Lowell revised the 
most important of the many addresses he had delivered in 
England, and in 1886 he published them in a single volume 
under the title of the full and rich discourse in which he 
had declared the better side of '* Democracy." Here at 
home Lowell never hesitated to point out the shortcom- 
ings of his countrymen, their errors and their blunders ; 
but when he was abroad it was on their merits only that 
he was willing to dwell. In the address on ''Democracy" 
he had told the British all that was best in our social sys- 
tem ; and when he came home he made haste to tell us 
Americans how we must labor to remove all that is evil 
in our social system. He did this in a speech on the 
** Independent in Politics," and this address was included 
in a volume of '' Political Essays " published in 1888. 

In this same year appeared also his last volume of 
poetry, ''Heartsease and Rue." In verse as in prose, 
Lowell was nearly always an improviser, pouring forth sud- 
denly in a single powerful jet all that he had been slowly 
bringing to a white heat within him. He lacked the patient 



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191 



192 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

toil of the artist who should not only file and polish, but 
if need be recast altogether. He worked too hastily for 
perfection of finish. The ** Biglow Papers " have a tune- 
fulness and a rhythmic swing lacking to most of his more 
serious poems. Some of these later verses have lightness 
and ease ; and they have also their share of the humorous 
shrewdness and the witty pith for which the '* Biglow 
Papers " are unsurpassed in all English literature. 

As Lowell drew near to the allotted limit of threescore 
years and ten he was everywhere recognized as one of the 
foremost citizens of the republic, a type of the character 
most needed in American public life — the man of broad 
culture, having a solid understanding of his fellow-men 
and a deep love of his country. Probably the later years 
of his life were made pleasanter by this atmosphere of 
appreciation. At last his health failed and he died on 
August 12, 1 89 1, being then seventy-two years old. 

Of the New England group of American authors, 
Lowell, although survived by both Whittier and Holmes, 
was the youngest except Parkman. All of these except 
Hawthorne and Parkman were poets, and the fame of 
Longfellow and Whittier may be said to be due wholly to 
their poetry. Lowell, like Emerson, w^as a poet also, but 
his work in prose was at least equal in value to his work 
in verse. He was the literary critic of the group, as Haw- 
thorne was the story-teller. 

Questions. — What are the points of interest in Lowell's life to 
the time of his marriage? 

What was his wife's influence in shaping his future career? 

Upon what occasion and with what weapons did Lowell make his 
first appearance in the poHtical arena? 

In what striking literary work did he show the soundness of his 
literary judgment ? 



i^ 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 



193 



From what two failings did LowelTs poetry suffer ? 

In what work did Lowell present an interesting mixture of linguistic 
knowledge and poetical satire ? 

What is the character of the volume in which he included a poem 
the parts of which are said to be greater than the whole? 

Discuss the qualities displayed by Lowell in the collections of essays 
published in the '70's. 

To what positions was Lowell appointed and how did he serve in 
these posts ? 

Tell about Lowell's career after his return to America. 



Note. — The complete edition of Lowell's works is that published by Ploughton 
Mifflin (11 vols.). The Cambridge edition contains all the poems in a single 
volume. " Under the Old Elm," etc., the " Vision of Sir Launfal," etc., and 
"Books and Libraries," etc., can be had as separate numbers of the Riverside 
Literature series (Houghton Mifflin). 

There are biographies by F. H. Underwood and H. E. Scudder (Houghton 
Mifflin). The "Correspondence," edited by C. E. Norton (Harper, 2 vols.) is 
almost an autobiography. There is a life by E. E. Hale, Jr., in the Beacon Biog- 
raphies (Small Maynard) and one by Ferris Greenslet in the American Men of 
Letters series (Houghton Mifflin). 

For criticism, see E. C. Stedman in "Poets of America" (Houghton Mifflin) ; 
Barrett Wendell in " Stelligeri " (Scribner) ; Henry James in " Essays in London " 
(Harper) ; E. E. Hale's " James Russell Lowell and his Friends " (Houghton 
Mifflin) ; T. W. Higginson's " Old Cambridge " (Macmillan) ; W. D. Howells's 
" Literary Friends and Acquaintance " (Harper) ; and W. C. Brownell's " American 
Prose Masters" (Scribner). 




XV FRANCIS PARKMAN 



It is not often that a man who forms a high purpose in 
his youth loyally devotes his whole life to its accomplish- 
ment, and finally survives just long enough to see that it is 
achieved. This, however, is what Francis Parkman did. 
When he was still but a boy in college he resolved to tell 
the story of the long struggle between the French and the 
English for the possession of North America. To this 
task he gave himself his whole life long ; and when the 
work was done at last, after the unhasting labor of nearly 
half a century, he was ready to die, being then about 

194 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 195 

seventy years of age. And this singular success was won 
in the face of difficulties which would have discouraged 
any man who had not very unusual firmness of fiber. 

Francis Parkman was born in Boston on September 
16, 1823. iie belonged to what Dr. Holmes called the 
** Brahmin caste of New England," that is to say, his ances- 
tors had been men of education and character generation 
after generation. The family had endowed two professor- 
ships at Harvard College. 

In his boyhood Parkman's health was not robust ; and 
he was sent to live in the country on the edge of the wild 
tract known as Middlesex Fells. Here he spent four 
years in intimate acquaintance with the forest. Then 
after proper schooling he entered Harvard College; and it 
was when he was a sophomore that he formed the purpose 
of writing the history of the French and Indian War^ 
a design which easily expanded later into that of telling 
the story of the whole conflict between the French and 
the English in North America. And from the day when 
this project first took shape in the mind of the young man 
at college, everything he did afterwards was made to con- 
tribute to its fulfillment. 

In one college vacation he camped and canoed in the 
backwoods of Maine, and in another he was able to explore 
all the recesses of Lake George and Lake Champlain. 
Even an accident in the gymnasium happened to help on 
his preparation for his work, because he made a voyage of 
recovery to Europe, and in Rome he lodged for a while 
in a monastery, thus getting to know more about the 
character and the training of the self-sacrificing priests 
whose devotion to duty he had afterward to chronicle. On 
his return home he rejoined his class and was graduated 
in 1844. For two years he seems to have studied law 



196 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

with more or less persistence. As it happened, his grand- 
father had made a fortune ; and there was therefore no 
immediate pressure on Parkman to set about earning his 
own living. 

Then he took a long journey to help fit himself for the 
task before him. He needed to know the Indians and to 
understand their enigmatic character. He wanted also. to 
study the frontiersmen, whose ways differ but little from 
those of their forefathers three or four generations ago, 
since like conditions are sure to produce men of like 
characteristics. In the time of the French and Indian War 
the red savage and the white borderer had been both of 
them close to the Atlantic coast ; but toward the middle 
of the nineteenth century the advance of civilization had 
pressed them back over the Alleghanies and across the 
Mississippi. It was to the Rocky Mountains that Park- 
man went in 1846 with a friend, spending a summer with 
the Sioux in their camps among the Black Hills of Dakota 
and on the vast tableland through which the Platte River 
twists itself languidly. 

He and his friend lived with the Indians, sharing their 
rough fare and studying their ways and their customs, and 
getting an insight into their character not to be had in any 
other manner. They underwent also the hardships of the 
Indians, the toils, the privations, the exposure ; and Park- 
man was so enfeebled by these that he never regained his 
strength. While with the Indians he was so ill that he 
had to be lifted into his saddle, and it was only because 
his will was firm enough to give him the mastery even 
over pain that he was able to get back to civilization. 
And when at last he made his way home he was perma- 
nently disabled ; and for three years he was unable to use 
his eyes. 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 197 

To the friend who had been with him in these Western 
wanderings he dictated a record of their experiences. This, 
after being printed in a magazine, was published in 1849 in 
a volume known now as the ''Oregon Trail." It is one of 
the very best books of outdoor adventure ever written and 
one of the most valuable, for it has preserved for us the 
outward appearance of a state of things long since vanished 
forever. From it the reader can gain an understanding of 
the red men and of their white neighbors, and a knowledge 
of the motives which rule their conduct, unobtainable from 
any other single book. It helps us to explain to ourselves 
the unending series of wars between the white race and the 
red, ever since the men of our stock first set foot on the 
soil which the Indian claimed for his own. It enables us 
to see for ourselves that the Indian Cooper presented in his 
novels is not unlike the real Indian, but that the real 
Indian had another side to him than the side Cooper chose 
to depict. 

His inherited means relieved Parkman from the neces- 
sity of writing for money, and it allowed him to undertake 
a long task not likely to pay him a full pecuniary reward 
even at the end. To many a young man with broken 
health this money might have been merely a temptation to 
luxurious idleness ; to many another it would have afforded 
an excuse for toying with literature as an amateur only ; 
to Parkman it yielded the opportunity for strenuous labor. 
Without his inherited wealth it would have been impos- 
sible for Parkman to have accomplished anything, since 
he was dependent on others for the things which other 
authors are able to do for themselves. 

For forty years and more he led what he himself called 
a life of ''repressed activity." His eyes had failed him; 
and he was aware that his mind might fail him also if he 



198 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



worked it hard. There were years when he was not 
allowed to work at all. There were years when he was 
able to read only for one minute at a time, resting the 
next minute and reading again the third and so on for 
half an hour, and when three or four of these broken half 
hours were all the reading he was allowed during the day. 
Of course he could not write; and all his histories were 
dictated to a member of his family, who prepared them 
for the press. 

The first book he composed after the pubUcation of the 

, '' Oregon Trail '' was 
an account of the 
cleverly planned In- 
dian rising which in 
1763 came so near to 
undoing the English 
victories over the 
French. This '' His- 
tory of the Conspiracy 
of Pontiac/' published 
in 185 1, is really a 
supplement to the 
main history of the 
struggle of the French 
and English for North 
America. Perhaps 
Parkman wrote it first 
because he was then fresh from actual contact with the 
Indians, and perhaps because he wished to try his 'prentice 
hand at a less important book before beginning his great 
history. 

It is almost inconceivable that he was able to accom- 
plish anything under the difficulties which held him fast ; 




Parkman's Residence, Boston, Mass. 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 



199 



but he devised in time a method of work which enabled 
him to overcome them finally. He made it a point always 
to see for himself the scene of every event he had to de- 
scribe ; and his descriptions of scenery are always lucid 
and graphic, sympathetic and picturesque. He collected 
all the books bearing in any way on the matter he had in 
hand, all histories, biographies, journals, accounts of all 
kinds. He had copies made for him of all the unprinted 
documents, private letters, official reports, and public 
statements, wherever these might be, in the libraries 
of America or in the government collections of France 
and Great Britain or in the personal archives of old fami- 
lies. He had the aid of competent assistants who read all 
the documents aloud to him twice, once that he might 
form in his own mind an outline of the story, and a sec- 
ond time that he might secure the salient details. As 
these documents were read he took notes or he had them 
taken. 

Thus slowly, laboriously, he was able to piece together 
the story he wanted to tell. Probably the aj.parent disad- 
vantage of the method he had to adopt was a real advan- 
tage, for it forced him to digest his materials absolutely, 
to think out to the end before he started on the beginning, 
to carry in his head the entire story complete in all its 
parts and proportioned properly. But though the result 
repaid him, the limitations under which he labored were 
very severe. 

A friend has described him as always *^ waiting for 
moments of health as his greatest blessing, glad to do a 
little, and always thankful when he could do more. 
He could not go into society, because it consumed his 
strength. He could see but few friends in his own house, 
for the same reason. His own family had to shield him 



200 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

from excitements. It was like fighting destiny to do any- 
thing, and yet month by month the noiseless fabric grew, 
and book after book was published, until his plan was 
completed/' 

The general title which he gave finally to his great work 
was ** France and England in North America." The suc- 
cessive seven books were each complete in themselves and 
yet all fitted together to make a compact whole. They 
were not published in a strictly chronological order, be- 
cause as Parkman grew in years he wished at least to 
leave behind him the most important divisions of the 
work ; but he lived to pick up all the parts passed 
over. 

The first to appear was the volume on the ** Pioneers of 
France in the New World,'' which is the opening of the 
series and which was published in 1865. In 1867 came 
the second book, on the ''Jesuits in North America in the 
Seventeenth Century," a narrative of heroic and fruitless 
endeavor, followed two years later by '* La Salle ; and the 
Discovery of the Great West." Then there was an inter- 
val of five years before the book on the ''Old Regime in 
Canada" appeared in 1874. Three years later came 
"Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV." 
The two books which conclude the series, and which were 
published in reverse order, are "A Half Century of Con- 
flict," issued in 1892, and "Montcalm and Wolfe," issued 
in 1884. 

No finer subject could any historian have than this con- 
flict of France and England for the possession of North 
America ; and no finer history has been written by any man 
of our time. It has the twofold merit that it can be read 
with pleasure and it can be relied on with confidence. 
Parkman first made himself master of all the facts and then 









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201 



202 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



he selected those which were essential and set them forth 
in most interesting fashion. 

In his reliance on research he was rigidly scientific ; in 
His presentation of the results of his research he was un- 
failingly artistic. He sought truth always, and having 
found it he tried to present it as beauty also. For every 
fact, every allusion, every picturesque touch, he could give 
his authority ; but he did not heap up his investigations 
crudely and make his readers form impressions of their 
own. He showed to the world the carved statue perfect 
in its strength and in its grace ; he did not draw attention 
to the models he used, to the rough block he had hewn, 
or to the scattered chips of the workshop. 

Parkman was happily married in 1852; but he lost his 
wife in 1858, after which he lived with his sister in Boston, 
either in the center of the city or in its outskirts on the 
shore of Jamaica Pond. In this latter place he was able to 
be outdoors and to become expert as a plant-grower, even 
originating new species. He wrote a book about roses ; 
and for a year or two he was professor of horticulture at 
Harvard. He used to say that his garden had saved his 
life. 

After the completion of his history in 1892 he began at 
once the revision of the earliest volumes in the light of his 
later labors. In this pleasant task he was engaged when 
he died on September 8, 1893. His work was done and 
he could die happy. 

After his death Holmes summed up his labors in a poem 
of which these stanzas may be quoted here : — 

He told the red man\s story ; far and wide 

He searched the unwritten records of his race ; 

He sat a listener at the Sachem's side, 

He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase. 



FRANCIS PARKMAN 203 

High o'er his head tlie soaring eagle screamed ; 

The wolfs long howl rang nightly ; through the vale 
Tramped the lone bear ; the panther's eyeballs gleamed ; 

The bison's gallop thundered on the gale. 

Soon o'er the horizon rose the cloud of strife — 
Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize — 

Which swarming host should mold a nation's life, 
Which royal banner flout the western skies. 

Long raged the conflict ; on the crimson sod 

Native and alien joined their hosts in vain ; 
The lilies withered where the Lion trod, 

Till Peace lay panting on the ravaged plain. 



Questions. — What is there remarkable about the hfe and works of 
Parkman ? 

How was the usual history of a well-born Boston boy varied in his 
case? 

Describe the events of the long journey which Parkman took in order 
to help fit himself for the task which he had already set before him. 

Compare the subject of Parkman's first book, as it was presented by 
him, with the same theme as it was pictured by an earlier American 
novelist. 

Describe the methods by which alone Parkman was enabled to com- 
plete his great undertaking. 

Describe the work that gives to Parkman a valid claim to be ranked 
with the foremost historians in the nineteenth century. 

How was his work summed up by Holmes? 



Note. — The complete edition of Parkman 's works is that published by Little 
Brown (13 vols.). There are various cheap editions of the " Oregon Trail." 

Charles H. Farnham has written Parkman 's biography (Little Brown). For a 
fragment of autobiography see the Harvard Graduates Magazine for May, 1895. 

For criticism, see Lowell in the Century iox November. 1892 ; John Fiske in his 
"A Century of Science" (Houghton Mifflin); and Theodore Roosevelt in the 
Independent for November 24, 1892. 



XVI DANIEL WEBSTER AND ABRAHAM 
LINCOLN 

While most of the writers whose works have been con- 
sidered were men who chose literature as a career and as 
a liveUhood, there were also other men not professional 
authors whose writing sometimes attained a high level of 
literary merit because they were able to bestow upon what 
they said or upon what they wrote the twin qualities of 
substance and of style. A letter or a speech may achieve 
its immediate purpose if it possesses the necessary sim- 
plicity, directness, and force, if the writer or the speaker 
conveys his thought so as to produce satisfactorily the 
impression he desires to produce. But now and again a 
letter or a speech may be so striking in its theme, so ele- 
vated in its thought, so nobly phrased, that it transcends 
its temporary object and survives the occasion which called 
it forth. 

Benjamin Franklin, for example, never thought of him- 
self as an author, and he never published a book. But he 
was so individual in his personality, he was so interesting 
in his expression, he was so clear and captivating in his 
style, that his letters to his friends and his casual papers 
composed for a temporary purpose have permanent value. 
They are read with pleasure and with profit to-day, more 
than a century after his death. He was an author by 
accident, so to speak, — not moved by the customary de- 
sire of men of letters for fame or for fortune. Many of 

204 



DANIEL WEBSTER AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN 205 



his contemporaries among the leaders of the Revolution 
also have left writings which were intended only to aid in 
the struggle for independence and for stable government, 
but which deserve recognition as contributions to Ameri- 
can literature. 

Not a few of the early state papers of our country have 
literary merit in a high degree. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, for example, written by 
Thomas Jefferson (i 743-1 826), after- 
ward President of the United States, 
most skillfully combines compact 
logic and brilliant rhetoric. It is a 
lofty and noble utterance of the 
sentiments of the people at a mo- 
ment of crisis ; and it is unsurpassed 
by any of the historical documents 
of any other people. The Constitu- 
tion of the United States, which was 
the result of the associated wisdom 
of the foremost statesmen of the 
time, owes much of its clarity and of its force to Gouver- 
neur Morris (175 2- 18 16), who was charged with the 
revision of its style and who was responsible for its simple 
and vigorous English. 

In arousing the public spirit which enabled us to achieve 
our independence, no single effort was perhaps more effec- 
tive than an appeal called '' Common Sense," written by 
Thomas Paine (173 7- 1809) and pubHshed in 1776; and 
the author followed it up with the successive issues of a 
periodical, the Crisis, which were also useful to the pa- 
triotic cause. 

After the revolution was accomplished and after the 
necessity was felt for a firm and yet flexible form of gov- 




Thomas Jefferson 



206 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 




Alexander Hamilton 



ernment, the proposed constitution might not have been 
adopted if it had not been explained and defended by a 
series of papers published from time to time in 1787-1788 
under the general title of the Federalist. These are, per- 
haps, the ablest political essays in the English language ; 
and they are like some of the great 
speeches of Burke, in that they were 
intended to effect an immediate pur- 
pose only and yet have served ever 
since as a perpetual storehouse of 
political wisdom. They were written 
by Alexander Hamilton (i 757-1 804), 
John Jay (1745-1829), and James 
Madison (1751-1836). After the adop- 
tion of the constitution Hamilton be- 
came Secretary of the Treasury under 
Washington, whom he afterwards aided in preparing the 
'' Farewell Address." Jay was the first Chief Justice of 
the Supreme Court ; and Madison was the fourth President 
of the United States. 

Nearer to us are two other American statesmen who 
demand consideration as men of letters, because of the 
permanent value of their occasional addresses. These two 
statesmen are Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, — 
the former a man of New England and the latter a man of 
the Middle West. Webster had in his youth the advantage 
of college training; but Lincoln had to give himself his 
own education after he had grown to manhood. Different 
as they were in their stock, in their upbringing, in their 
development, in their characters, they were alike in 
possessing a single-hearted devotion to the Union. And 
to these two men more than to any others do we owe it 
that the United States are still united and that the gov- 



DANIEL WEBSTER AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN 207 



ernment established by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, 
still survives in its integrity. 

Daniel Webster was born in 1782, on January 18, and 
he died in 1852, on October 24. In the year of his birth 
Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the 
United States ; and in the year of his death Mrs. Stowe 
published ** Uncle Tom's Cabin," 
which aroused an increasing 
animosity toward slavery and 
which was in itself evidence 
that an irrepressible conflict 
w^as impending between the 
defenders and the opponents of 
slavery. For more than half 
of his threescore years and ten 
Webster was the most important 
figure in American public life. 

Born in New Hampshire, he 
was graduated from Dartmouth 
College in 1801. Admitted to 

the bar, he practiced law in his native state until he was 
thirty-five; and then, in 18 17, in the ripe maturity of his 
ability as an advocate, he removed to Boston. In 1822 
Boston sent him to Congress; and in 1827 Massachusetts 
sent him to the Senate of the United States, where he 
was soon recognized as its dominant personality. In 1841 
and again in 1850 he served as Secretary of State ; and in 
this office he was able to negotiate a treaty with Great 
Britain which settled once for all most of the ques- 
tions then in dispute between the British and the 
American peoples. Conscious of his services and of 
his fitness for the position, Webster naturally desired 
an election to the Presidency; and the failure to attain 




\^v 



Daniel Webster 



208 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

this long-sought honor was to him a bitter disappoint- 
ment. 

For thirty years his leadership of the American bar was 
indisputable, and he was equally successful in civil and 
in criminal cases. He was as adroit in winning the ver- 
dict of a jury in a murder trial as he was ingenious in 
gaining a decision upon a constitutional question from the 
Supreme Court of the United States. But effective as 
was his eloquence in the courtroom, it was not there as 
far-reaching as it was in senatorial debate or in commemo- 
rative addresses. 

He delivered two orations at Bunker Hill, the first in 
1825, at the laying of the cornerstone of the monument, 
and the second in 1843, when the towering memorial had 
been at last completed. In these two great addresses 
Webster expressed simply and superbly the main idea 
which always animated his appeals to the American 
people. This main idea can be stated briefly in his own 
famous phrase — ''The Union, now and forever, one and 
indivisible." He knew the necessity for dwelling on this, 
as he had seen in his youth a separatist movement in 
Massachusetts during Jefferson's administration and as he 
had later opposed the nullification movement in South 
Carolina during Jackson's administration. The same idea 
was at the core of his mightiest effort, the '' Reply to 
Hayne," delivered in the Senate in 1830. Iterated and 
reiterated by Webster, year after year, in speech after 
speech, this idea sank into the consciousness of the grow- 
ing generations and helped to bring about the intense 
devotion to the Union which resulted in its preservation 
after four years of civil war. And it was by this in- 
sistence upon the necessity of our remaining a single 
nation, and by thus arousing an abiding patriotism, that 



DANIEL WEBSTER AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN 209 

Webster made the difficult task of Lincoln a little less 
difficult. 

For oratory Webster was marvelously endowed by nature, 
not only with the needed mental powers, but also with the 
supporting physical presence. Emerson said that ''Web- 
ster had a natural ascendency of aspect and carriage 

His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in 
so grand a style, that he was, without an effort, as superior 
to his most eminent rivals as they were to the humblest.'* 
Although he was not above medium height, his massive 
person made him seem a giant. His eyes were fiery 
beneath his cavernous brow. His voice was a wonderful 
instrument, which he used with wonderful skill: ''it was 
low and musical in conversation," so one of his biographers 
has recorded ; " in debate it was high but full, ringing out 
in moments of excitement like a clarion, and then sinking 
to deep notes with the solemn richness of organ tones." 

In his memorial address on John Adams and Thomas 
Jefferson (who had both died on July 4, 1826, exactly half 
a century after the signing of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence), Webster defined elcquence; and in so doing he 
characterized the art as he himself triumphantly practiced 
it. " Nothing is valuable in speech farther than as it is 
connected with high intelligence and moral endowments. 
Clearness,. force, and earnestness are the qualities which 
produce conviction. True eloquence, indeed, does not 
consist in speech. It cannot be brought from far. Labor 
and learning may toil for it, but they will toil in vain. 
Words and phrases may be marshaled in every way, but 
they cannot compass it. It must exist in the man, in the 
subject, and in the occasion. Affected passion, intense 
expression, the pomp of declamation, all may aspire to it ; 
LEiey cannot reach it. It comes, if it come at all, like the 



210 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the bursting 
forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native 
force." 

It is in the ** Reply to Hayne '* that Webster attained 
the summit of his oratory. Then, more than at any other 
time, do we feel the full conjunction of the man, the sub- 
ject, and the occasion. Then we find *'the clear concep- 
tion, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, 
the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the 
tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, 
and urging the whole man onward." If we needed proof 
that Webster was one of the greatest orators the world 
has ever known, we can find it in a dozen of his speeches 
at the bar or in the Senate ; but the sole '' Reply to Hayne " 
would be evidence enough. John Fiske went so far as to 
suggest that '' for genuine oratorical power, the ^ Reply to 
Hayne' is probably the greatest speech that has been de- 
lived since the oration of Demosthenes, ' On the Crown, ' " 
which is accepted as the masterpiece of Greek oratory. 

The career of Abraham Lincoln (i 809-1 865) is an in- 
tegral part of the history of the United States ; and there 
is no need here to set down the details of his Hfe. He 
was the son of a pioneer who settled first in the back- 
woods of Kentucky and who later removed to Illinois — 
frontier states where there was then only scant schooling 
for the young. But Abraham Lincoln was intensely 
eager for self-improvement ; he profited by all that his 
few and ill-trained teachers could impart; and he was 
resolute and untiring in acquiring information and in im- 
proving his command of the English language. He fitted 
himself for the bar and he became one of the foremost 
lawyers of Springfield, the capital of Illinois. He had 
experience in the state legislature and in the national 



DANIEL WEBSTER AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN 211 



Congress ; and he was early interested in the most im- 
portant political question for which a solution had to be 
found by the American people. He saw the menace of 
slavery ; he gave himself to the duty of combating its 
extension ; and he became the most persuasive and the 
most powerful of political speakers. 

Both as a lawyer in court and as a participant of political 
debate, Lincoln's desire was always to be perfectly fair to 
his opponent, to avoid over- 
statement, to be precise and 
exact, to be clear, and to 
put his case so simply that 
it could not be misunder- 
stood. His early experi- 
ences in business, in the 
legislature and at the bar, 
helped him to get at the 
heads and to move the 
hearts of the plain people, 
to whom he always ad- 
dressed himself. He had 
an abiding integrity ; and 
he was as honest with him- 
self as he was with others. Abraham Lincoln 

He sought always to penetrate to the center of the subject 
he was trying to master, never contenting himself with 
half-knowledge, never allowing himself to be fooled by loud- 
sounding phrases, and never employing empty words in the 
vain endeavor to befool those to whom he was appealing. 

So it was that the uncouth and illiterate youth, born in 
the backwoods, and thereby excluded from formal edu- 
cation, was able to acquire the art of expression and the 
art of persuasion, by persistent training at the hand of 




212 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the severest and strictest of teachers, — himself. As he 
advanced in years he enriched his vocabulary ; he was in- 
sistent in informing himself as to the precise meaning of 
every new word that he added to his store ; and he did 
not rest until he had assured himself as to its full con- 
tent and as to its limitations. He seems never to have 
thought about his own writing merely as writing ; he made 
no effort for style ; his purpose was to gain so complete 
a command over words that he could express his thoughts 
adequately so that all men might understand him, no 
matter how little education they happened to have. He 
had an imagination which gave him a sympathetic under- 
standing of the average man ; and it was always the 
average man that he was trying to convert. 

As we read the collected letters of Lincoln and the suc- 
cession of his speeches, we can follow the growth of his 
mind and the constant improvement in his power of 
expressing the results of his thinking. We cannot fail to 
see that in writing and in speaking, he was never thinking 
about himself or about what others might think of him ; 
his efforts were all bent to persuasion, to the convincing 
of those who might hear him that slavery threatened the 
existence of the Union. He was ever sincere and simple ; 
he did not parade verbal ornament; he did not waste 
words ; he stuck closely to the matter in hand. As a 
result of this self-restraint his method of writing became 
more artistic as he grew in experience; his words were 
more aptly chosen, and more harmoniously adjusted ; and 
they came at last to have a cadence which added immeas- 
urably to their emotional appeal. 

So it was that when he delivered his '' First Inaugural 
Address '' as President of the United States he was, all 
unknown to himself, a master of language, satisfied to 









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213 



214 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

employ the commonest words and able somehow to bestow 
on them the noble elevation of statement, the sweeping 
amplitude of phrase, and the rhythmic sonority which can 
be found only in the accredited masterpieces of oratory, 
•ancient and modern. The ** Second Inaugural Address " 
is even better than the first; and the address deHvered at 
the dedication of the battlefield of Gettysburg is a con- 
summate example of high thinking, lofty feeling, and 
pathetic expression. As Webster's ''Reply to Hayne " 
withstands comparison with the speech of Demosthenes 
"On the Crown," so Lincoln's ''Gettysburg Address" 
has no rival except the memorial oration of Pericles as 
reported by the historian Thucydides. 

Questions. — Which of the early American state papers have high 
literary merit ? 

Which of the other political writings of the end of the eighteenth 
century have permanent value ? 

What was the constant theme of Webster's political addresses ? . 

How did Lincoln train himself to be a master of language ? 

Contrast Webster and Lincoln as orators. 

With what great Greek orators may they be compared ? 

Note. — Biographies of Jefferson, Hamilton, jay. Morris, Madison, Webster, 
and Lincoln are included in the American Statesmen series i^ Houghton Mifflin). 




XVII ^^MARK TWAIN" 



(Samuel Langhorne Clemens) 

The writers who have been discussed in the last few 
chapters were poets and story-tellers, essayists and histo- 
rians. Most of them were college graduates ; and they 
had been trained in the inherited literary traditions. The 
writer who came to be recognized as the foremost figure in 
American literature when they had departed one after 
another was a story-teller and an essayist, but he was first 
of all a humorist ; he was a Westerner, with no allegiance 
to the older East ; he was a self-educated man, schooled by 

215 



2l6 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the imperative experience of life ; and he had spontaneous 
originality and he was free from all deference to mere con- 
vention. He was a strong man who stood on his own feet 
and looked at the world fearlessly out of his own honest 
eyes. He did his own thinking in his own fashion ; and 
he taught himself how to phrase what he thought, so that 
his meaning was clear to all men. He chose to be known 
as *' Mark Twain '' ; his real name was Samuel Langhorne 
Clemens. 

He was born November 30, 1835, at Florida, Missouri, 
and he spent his boyhood at Hannibal, a little town on 
the Mississippi. What sort of place it was we can see 
by reading *'Tom Sawyer'' and '* Huckleberry Finn" in 
which the author drew on the memories of his youth. 
His father died when he was only twelve, and he had but 
scant schooling. He worked three years in the local 
printing office ; and he wandered, here and there, as a 
journeyman printer. When he was seventeen he resolved 
to become a river pilot ; and he has narrated in '* Life on 
the Mississippi" how he learned the river. But after he 
had mastered the complicated art of the pilot, he was 
allowed to make his living by it for only two or three 
years. The Civil War broke out, and the Mississippi was 
no longer open to steamboats. 

Young Clemens was then twenty-five, but he was still 
boyishly impetuous. He had a very brief service with a 
company of Confederate volunteers ; and then he resigned 
and accompanied his brother to Nevada. In '* Roughing 
It " he has described his long trip across the plains and the 
mountains, — recording also many episodes of Western 
adventure in those early days of mining experiment. It 
was in Nevada that he began to write, at first as a reporter 
only, but putting forth now and again humorous sketches 



MARK TWAIN 217 

which he signed " Mark Twain." From Nevada he went 
to California, contributing to various journals in San 
Francisco, and going on a voyage to the Sandwich Islands. 
It was in San Francisco that he made his first appearance 
on the lecture platform. 

In 1867 his first book was published; it was a volume of 
comic sketches, and it bore the title of the most famous of 
his briefer tales, the *' Jumping Frog." In the summer 
of that year he was one of a party who sailed for the 
Mediterranean in a specially chartered ship. The travelers 
visited France and Italy, Egypt and the Holy Land ; and 
out of the weekly letters he had written back to a Cali- 
fornia newspaper, he made up a volume of travels and 
sketches, called the '* Innocents Abroad," which was pub- 
lished in 1869 and which won immediate popularity. It was 
in this book that Mark Twain first revealed himself to the 
pubhc as a humorist of large resources, commanding the 
springs of laughter and reflecting the spectacle of life from 
an unexpected angle. 

In 1870 he married Miss Olivia Langdon, and even in 
the fortunate annals of American authorship there has 
been no happier marriage. A little later he settled in 
Hartford, which was to be his home for a score of years. 
He published '* Roughing It" in 1872; and a few years 
later there came forth his first effort in fiction, the ** Gilded 
Age," written in partnership with Charles Dudley Warner. 
The chief figure of this story. Colonel Mulberry Sellers, 
he put also into a loose-jointed play which was received 
with pleasure by the playgoing public. 

Perhaps it was the success of this first story composed 
in collaboration which encouraged him to a second effort 
in fiction in which he relied on himself only. In *' Tom 
Sawyer" he drew on the rich recollections of his own boy- 



2l8 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

ish adventures, and he recaptured the full flavor of boy- 
hood. It is in this story that Mark Twain first disclosed 
his power as a creator of character and as a painter of 
social conditions. It is a most amusing book, abounding 
in laughable episodes; but it is also much more than 
funny, for it tells the truth about life, and it is sustained 
by a sturdy morality, never protruded but unmistakable, 
none the less. 

The ** Adventures of Tom Sawyer " was published in 
1875, when the author was just forty, which seems to be 
the age when a writer has matured enough to be equipped 
for a longer venture in fiction. In the next few years he 
gathered together two or three volumes of his briefer writ- 
ings. Then he went to Europe again; and in 1880 he 
issued the record of a few of the experiences of this trip 
in *' A Tramp Abroad," a volume quite as funny as the 
*^ Innocents Abroad," yet with a more restrained humor 
and with a broader outlook upon life. His style was still 
breezy and unconventional and individual ; but it was 
firmer, more vigorous, more assured. On his return to 
his own country he wrote a second boy's book, the '' Prince 
and the Pauper," a historic fantasy of Tudor times in Eng- 
land, lacking the unconscious intimacy of "Tom Sawyer," 
but reveahng his sympathy with unmerited suffering and 
his sturdy hatred of meanness and oppression. 

Then he returned to the solid ground of his youthful 
experience and wrote a sequel to '* Tom Sawyer," which 
he called the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." This 
is his masterpiece, and it is one of the masterpieces of the 
fiction of the EngHsh language. It was rooted in knowl- 
edge, for its action is confined to the Mississippi valley 
which he had studied as man and boy. It is an excellent 
story, full of unforgetable scenes and peopled with vera- 



MARK TWAIN 219 

cious characters drawn from life and seized in the act. 
But it is also much more than a mere story, since it is a 
permanent picture of a vanished civiUzation ; it is a pano- 
rama of the picturesque circumstances of the river folk in 
the years before the Civil War. Mark Twain not only 
etched the men and women who dwelt along the Missis- 
sippi in those days now forever departed, he also caught 
and made visible to us their sentiments, their prejudices, 
and their attitude toward the problems of life. 

" Huckleberry Finn "was published in 1884 ; ^.nd in 1883 
Mark Twain had elaborated an earlier account of his 
experiences as a cub pilot. This *' Life on the Missis- 
sippi " is really a series of chapters from his autobiography, 
just as the earlier *' Roughing It" had been. In these 
two books he was setting down accurately, even though 
humorously, the things he had seen with his own eyes in 
his impressionable youth, — things that no other writer 
had seen. And these books have therefore an abiding 
value as historical documents supplying information about 
aspects of American civilization not otherwise accessible. 
Of course, this supplying of information was not the au- 
thor's primary purpose, which was rather to amuse by the 
record of experiences that seemed to him individual and 
interesting. 

His best books are those in which he drew on these ex- 
periences, whether he set them down soberly and humor- 
ously as matters of fact or dealt with them more liberally 
as the foundation and the background of fiction. But like 
other great humorists who had also the sense of reality, 
like Aristophanes and like Rabelais, he had a fondness for 
fantasy, for getting away from his own time and his own 
people and for voyaging back into the past. The " Prince 
and the Pauper" had been his first venture into historic 



220 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

fiction; and he made a second in 1889 when he published 
'* A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court." This 
was a comic romance, in which the author contrasted the 
old and the new, the ideas of England hundreds of years 
ago with the ideas of New England in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. This is as broadly funny as any of his writings; and 
it has passages of pathos as simple as any in the ''Prince 
and the Pauper." Both of these historic fantasies make 
plain his gentleness and his kindhness, his utter abhorrence 
of tyranny and cruelty. 

There is no need to catalogue the titles of all his later 
writings, which followed in swift succession during the 
remaining years of his Hfe. He had the affluent pro- 
ductivity of a large genius ; and his complete books ex- 
tend to more than a score of stately volumes. They were 
issued in a uniform edition in 1899, when his position in 
English Hterature was firmly estabUshed. There are, how- 
ever, three of these later works which demand consider- 
ation. One is *' Pudd'nhead Wilson," pubHshed in 1894; 
it is another story of real life, with its scene laid in the 
Mississippi valley that he knew so well; it is a worthy 
mate of "Tom Sawyer" and of '* Huckleberry Finn." 
Another is *' Joan of Arc," a historical novel, published in 
1896; it is almost devoid of humor, which would have been 
wholly out of place in a book with so noble a heroine. 
Instead of humor this book has dignity and reverence ; to 
many readers it seems to be the least characteristic of all 
its author's works; but it is a book only Mark Twain could 
have written. The third of the later writings which de- 
mands special notice is the '* Man that Corrupted Hadley- 
burg," pubhshed in 1900. This is a brief tale of modern 
American life ; it is a parable, akin to the '' Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress" in its method and in its meaning and able to with- 



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221 



"2^22 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

stand comparison with that masterpiece of apologue. It 
has the tense terseness of Swift and the playful ease of Vol- 
taire, without the mean malignity of Swift's misanthropy 
and without the disintegrating acid of Voltaire's malice. 

But before " Joan of Arc " and the '' Man that Corrupted 
Hadleyburg " had been written Mark Twain had met with 
a sudden misfortune. He had become involved with a pub- 
lishing house which failed — the same evil fate which had 
befallen Sir Walter Scott in his old age. Mark Twain was 
past sixty when he found himself stripped of his earnings and 
saddled with a load of debt. It might have been possible 
for him to avoid these obligations, but he determined to 
clear them off to the last dollar. He set out on a lectur- 
ing voyage around the world to make the money needed 
to pay these debts. The record of this voyage he pub- 
lished in 1897; he called it '* Following the Equator,'' 
and although it showed signs of fatigue it was a worthy 
sequel to the *' Innocents Abroad" and to ** A Tramp 
Abroad." 

Before he returned from this circling of the globe 
another and deeper sorrow came to him. His eldest 
daughter died. His had been a singularly happy home and 
a beautifully united family. The loss of this daughter was 
a stroke from which the father never recovered. It was 
followed in a few years by the death of Mrs. Clemens, 
who had long been an invalid, tenderly cared for by her 
husband. And then only a few months before his own 
death, his youngest daughter died as suddenly as the eldest 
had done. In the last years of his life he had been a wan- 
derer, unwilling to return to Hartford, because of its mem- 
ories of former happiness ; the family had lived here and 
there in Europe for two or three years. After his return 
to America and after he had cleared himself from all 



MARK TWAIN 



223 



indebtedness he finally settled down in a house he had 
built at Redding, Connecticut. 

Despite his private griefs, the later years of his life were 
gladdened by the growing recognition of his position as a 
chief figure in American literature and as an author of 
international fame. In 1907 he went over to England to 
receive a degree from Oxford, an honor which he highly 
prized. Then he came back to his country home in Con- 




Mark Twain's Residence, Redding, Conn. 

necticut to work on his autobiography, fragments from 
which he had already allowed to be printed, — fragments 
which display the deeper side of his nature, the funda- 
mental melancholy in which his exuberant humor was 
rooted. And it was in this new house of his own that he 
died, on April 21, 1910, when he was seventy-four years old. 
Mark Twain was a voluminous writer, and his work is 
strangely uneven in quality. His taste was uncertain, and 



224 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

sometimes it may even be called perverse. His best books, 
even ''Tom Sawyer" and ''Huckleberry Finn," are not 
sustained at their highest level, and they contain passages 
which we could wish away, passages out of keeping, 
passages in which the humor is inexpensive and artificial. 
There is no need to deny that there were gaps in his 
equipment, failings of his insight, limitations of his sym- 
pathy. It seemed sometimes as though he knew that his 
readers expected him to be funny at all costs and that he 
felt himself bound to respond to this unhappy expectation. 
Although he could make fun, his nature, like that of every 
other true humorist, was fundamentally serious; and he 
rejoiced in his later years that he could reveal more often 
this deeper aspect of his nature. He had intellectual 
independence, essential sanity, and elemental largeness. 
When an author has won a reputation by books that 
make us laugh, he has to pay the penalty of his humor and 
it is hard for us to take him seriously. It may be long 
before we discover that he is more than a mere fun-maker ; 
and it was only in the later years of his life that there was 
a wide recognition of what ought to have been evident 
earlier — that Mark Twain was a humorist and a master 
humorist, beyond all question, but that he was also a story- 
teller, a stylist, and a moralist. Humor in Mark Twain 
was free and spontaneous, abundant and individual. It 
was rarely merely verbal ; generally it had its roots deep 
in the pettinesses and in the inconsistencies of human 
nature. Often it derived its power from the imperturba- 
bility of matter-of-fact narration of a superbly magnified 
impossibility. It is seen at its richest in the passage in 
the " Innocents Abroad " wherein Mark Twain weeps over 
the grave of Adam as a long-lost relative. It is shrewdly 
disclosed in the account of Tom Sawyer's letting the con- 



MARK TWAIN 



225 



tract to whitewash his aunt's fence. It is exuberant and' 
irresistible in the " Jumping Frog." His humor is ever good 
humor, never irreverent, save toward things unworthy, 
and never mocking save toward things of ill repute. 

As a story-teller, as a painter of Ufe, he is to be counted 
with the masters of fiction. It is true that his work was 
variable and not always evenly sustained. But it is by his 
best that he is to be measured. He could tell a story with 
undeniable power; he could invent situations of com- 
pelling interest, serious as well as humorous ; and he could 
create character with commingled imagination and veracity. 
There are few great moments in fiction finer than that 
when Tom Sawyer, lost in the cave, sees a light in the 
distance and discovers that it is held by Indian Joe, his 
one mortal enemy, — that is worthy of comparison with 
Robinson Crusoe's finding the solitary footprint in the sand 
after his long years of loneliness on the island. Equally 
fine are the Sherburn-Boggs and the Shepherdson-Granger- 
ford episodes in '* Huckleberry Finn." And perhaps even 
deeper in its power, and more poignant in its pathos, is the 
scene in ** Pudd'nhead Wilson " in which the wicked son 
sells his own mother for a slave. 

And the style is equal to the substance. Mark Twain 
wrote simply, unpretentiously, forcibly ; and as he grew in 
literary ambition his style became firmer and finer. It was 
not bookish, nor academic, but racy with the flavor of the 
soil, essentially American, like Franklin's and Lincoln's. 
He was a master of the vernacular ; he had command of 
the unhackneyed word, unexpected and inevitable. The 
style was like the man, as it must be in all good writing; 
it was sincere and manly and wholly devoid of affectation. 
It was often loftily imaginative, while always perfectly 
simple, — as in the description of the Jungfrau by moon- 



226 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

light (in the " Innocents Abroad "). It was picturesque 
and evocative, as in the portraits in the parliamentary dis- 
pute in Austria. It was marvelous in its cold transparency, 
as in the " Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg." 

Perhaps it is in the " Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg '* 
that Mark Twain most clearly discloses himself as a moral- 
ist. But in the '' Prince and the Pauper " and especially in 
" Huckleberry Finn " it is easy to see that the narrative 
was supported by a rich understanding of the complexities 
of human society. He made us think even when he made 
us laugh. His ethical outlook was all his own, — but it 
would be well for us if it was ours also. 

A humorist, a story-teller, a stylist, and a moralist, — such 
was Mark Twain, the first and foremost contribution to 
American literature which has been made by the West. 
He was not local in his outlook and not sectional ; he was 
not provincial and he was not colonial ; he was intensely 
and essentially American; and his place in the English 
literature of the nineteenth century is with its leaders. 

Questions. — In what way do the circumstances of Mark Twain's 
youth differ from those of the New England authors? 

In what books has he drawn on the memories of his boyhood? 

Which of his books are largely autobiographical? 

What were his early travels ? 

W^hat advance in literary skill did he disclose in '* Tom Sawyer " and 
in '^ Huckleberry Finn '* ? 

Discuss his three ventures into historical fiction. 

What misfortune befell him when he was pr.st sixty? 

What gladdened his last years ? 

What are the more obvious limitations of his writing? 

What are the four characteristics which insure his fame? 

Note. — The complete edition of Mark Twain's works is published by Harper. 
There is a biography by Albert Bigelow Paine (Harper), who has also edited 
a copious collection of" Mark Twain's Letters " (Harper). 

For criticism, see W. D. Howells's '* My Mark Twain " (Harper), 



XVIII EUGENE FIELD AND JAMES 
WHITCOMB RILEY 

As all the original settlements of the English-speaking 
peoples had been made on the Atlantic coast, and as it was 
only after long years that our ancestors were enabled to 
thrust themselves across the Alleghanies on their resistless 
march to the Pacific, it is only natural that the earliest 
American authors should have been born in the East. So 
we have found that the earliest group of our writers to at- 
tract attention, toward the end of the first quarter of the 
nineteenth century, were all of them New Yorkers, by 
residence if not by birth — Irving and Cooper and Bryant. 
And we have seen that another group, coming forward a 
score of years later and gathering about Emerson, were all 
New Englanders. 

While the men of both groups were resolutely national 
in sentiment, they were necessarily more or less sectional 
in their selection of subject. Irving lays the scene of 
*'Rip Van Winkle" on the banks of the Hudson; and 
Cooper places the adventures of the *' Last of the Mohi- 
cans " on the banks of the Mohawk. Hawthorne finds the 
fit background for the ** Scarlet Letter" in Massachusetts; 
and so does Longfellow for his '* Courtship of Miles Stan- 
dish." Then, as the Middle West slowly filled up, it also 
produced authors of distinction. Our two foremost orators 
are Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and Abraham Lincoln 
of Illinois. Still later, Mark Twain, born in the South- 

227 



228 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

west, painted for us a flowing panorama of life on the 
mighty Mississippi as it was in the years just before the 
Civil War. To-day, in the first quarter of the twentieth 
century, there are tellers of tales and singers of songs in 
almost every state of the Union, lovingly dealing with the 
manners and customs of their own sections. 

These studies in local color are more abundant now than 
ever before, but they had been attempted with only in- 
frequent success by more than one writer of a century ago. 
The earliest American romancer, Charles Brockden Brown 
( 1 77 i-i 8 lo), was a Philadelphian, whose strange and 
gloomy tales preserve for us the picturesque atmosphere of 
the end of the eighteenth century in the placid Pennsyl- 
vania of those remote times. Two Southern novelists fol- 
lowed Cooper in dealing with the life of their own section. 
One was John Pendleton Kennedy (i 795-1 870), who wrote 
two Virginia stories, '' Swallow Barn," published in 1832, 
and '* Horse-Shoe Robinson," published in 1835. The 
other was William Gilmore Simms (i 806-1 870), who ap- 
plied Cooper's method to Southern scenes and characters. 
Perhaps the most interesting of the many tales due to his 
facile pen is the *' Yemassee," pubHshed in 1835. 

It would not be overpraising the folk-tales which Uncle 
Remus told to the little boy if we were to declare them as 
good as the fables of Aesop or as the fairy stories of the 
brothers Grimm. The creator of the alluring and enduring 
figure of Uncle Remus was Joel Chandler Harris (1848- 
1908). He was a Georgian ; and he wrote many stories and 
sketches of the Southern life and character, revealing in- 
timate knowledge of the people of his section. It was with 
equal understanding and with equal sympathy that he 
delineated white folks and black, — although it is by his 
portrait of a negro, the unforgetable figure of the shrewd 



EUGENE FIELD AND JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 229 




Joel Chandler Harris 



Uncle Remus, that his fame Ls now secure in the affections 

of the young. This fame was won by his prose ; but Harris 

also wrote verse, most of it in the * 

dialect of the Georgia negroes. 
Another American story-teller and 

poet, who became known a little 

earlier than Harris and who also 

used dialect in his verse, was Bret 

Harte (1839- 1902). He was an 

Easterner by birth who had been 

taken as a boy to the Pacific coast, 

where he was greatly impressed by 

the romance and the picturesque- 

ness which accompanied the sudden 

rush into California after the discovery of gold. It was 

the " Argonauts of '49," as he called them, whom he 

took as the unheroic heroes of his first volume of char- 
acter-studies, the *' Luck of Roaring Camp '* ; and of all 
his books this is the freshest in 
catching the flavor of the soil and 
the most vigorous in capturing the 
color of the epoch. It is probable 
that Bret Harte was inclined to over- 
sentimentalize his stalwart miners 
and stage-drivers ; and it is certain 
that his dialect was not so carefully 
studied from life as that of Mark 
Twain. His reputation rests rather 
on his prose than on his verse ; and 
yet several of his humorous lyrics 

won widespread popularity, notably the one about '' The 

Heathen Chinee." 

It is, however, by their verse and not by their prose 




Bret Harte 



230 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



that two other writers, identified with the Middle West, 
are now best remembered. These two are Eugene Field 
and James Whitcomb Riley. It would not be accurate to 
assert that their positions in American Hterature are more 
important than those of Bret Harte and Joel Chandler 
Harris. Neither of them created a character as convinc- 
ing as the Uncle Remus of Harris or painted a gallery of 

portraits as varied as the 
" Argonauts of '49 " of 
Harte. Yet there are ob- 
vious reasons why they 
may here be considered in 
greater detail than their 
two interesting predeces- 
sors. They were unpre- 
tending bards, both of 
them, deahng with homely 
doings and simple affec- 
tions ; and as a result of 
their desire to get close to 
the hearts of the plain 
people, some of their 
humble lyrics sang them- 

Eugene Field , . ^ , 

selves into the memory 
more easily than the more pretentious efforts of poets 
of a loftier aspiration but of a lesser inspiration. 

Eugene Field was born in St. Louis on September 2, 
1850. His boyhood was spent in New England, where 
he failed to profit by the opportunity of education as fully 
as he might. The casualness of his studies is made plain 
by the fact that when the time came for him to go to col- 
lege, he wandered from Amherst to WiUiams, and then a 
year later from Knox College to the University of Mis- 




EUGENE FIELD AND JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 23 1 

souri, not working diligently in any one of these insti- 
tutions and not persevering until graduation. He was a 
wayward youth, indulging in a succession of harmless 
pranks and taking scant thought of his own future. In 
1872 he came into a little money, which he spent in a trip 
to Europe, — perhaps as profitable an investment of his 
heritage as he could have made, since this travel enlarged 
his acquaintance with life and broadened his background 
of experience. 

On his return from his European wanderings he married 
Miss Julia Comstock ; and he started in to earn his living 
as a reporter on a St. Louis evening paper. It was by 
newspaper work of one kind or another that he was able 
to support himself and his family during the score or more 
of years that he was to survive. In one capacity or an- 
other he worked on various journals in several Missouri 
cities. In 1881 he joined the staff of a paper in Denver, 
where he made himself immediately at home and where 
he first attained more than a local reputation. It was, 
however, not until he was called to Chicago in 1883 that 
his name began to be known to a broader public. 

Certain of the friends whom he made in Chicago guided 
his reading and stimulated his interest in books of a more 
enduring value than those with which he had earlier been 
content. He was attracted more particularly to the lyrics 
of Horace ; and he began to render into English one or 
another of these little masterpieces of metrical art. His 
standards became more exacting ; and he studied out for 
himself the secrets of rhythm and of rime, with a constant 
delight in metrical experiment. 

It was his duty to the newspaper to furnish a daily 
column of paragraphs dealing wilh the topics of the time, 
shooting folly as it flew, satirizing the affectations of the 



232 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

moment. His humor was good humor; and while he held 
the humbugs up to laughter he did it without malice or 
bitterness. Of course, most of the paragraphs which Field 
provided day after day were for that day only ; they were 
airy trifles and quaint whimsies, local and temporary in 
their interest. 

But as he developed in congenial association with his 
Chicago friends and as his ambition awakened, he began 
to print in his column poems not called forth by the pass- 
ing show and not fleeting in their appeal. Some of these 
were careful translations from Horace and Heine and 
Beranger. Some of them were boldly humorous lyrics, 
full of frank fun, felicitous in their rimes and excellent in 
their recurrent refrains ; a few of them were commingled 
of gentle humor and restrained pathos. A first selection 
of the most popular of these newspaper poems was pub- 
lished in 1889 as " A Little Book of Western Verse '' ; and 
it was favorably received by the reading public, who recog- 
nized its sincerity and relished its individuality. 

Field's health was uncertain ; and in the year which 
saw the publication of his ** Little Book" he made atrip 
to Europe in the hope that he might be benefited by a 
change of scene. On his return he took up his news- 
paper work ; and he was encouraged to write more elab- 
orate sketches in prose, endowing them with not a little of 
the quaintness and the charm characteristic of his lyrics. 
Another collection of these was issued in 1892 modestly 
entitled ** Second Book of Verse." His health continued 
precarious ; and at the early age of forty-five, he died on 
Nov. 5, 1895. 

Half a dozen volumes of prose are included in the com- 
plete edition of Field's works ; but his fame is made 
secure by a score of the poems, grave and gay, which 



i 



EUGENE FIELD AND JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 233 



were included in one or another of his volumes of verse. 
It was by these lilting lyrics, some of them boldly humor- 
ous and dressed in picturesque dialect, some of them 
gently pathetic, that he won his way into the affections of 
his fellow Americans, who recognized him as one of them- 
selves, as a product of our soil, not possible in any other 
clime than ours. And of all his more delicate lyrics it is 
more particularly by those which 
deal lovingly with childhood that 
he is likely longest to be remem- 
bered, — '' Little Boy Blue," for 
example, and the **Dutch 
Lullaby" with its recurrent 
**Wynken and Blynken and 
Nod." As one of his most in- 
timate friends has recorded, — 
Eugene Field always felt him- 
self at home in the society of 
children. ** He was forever 
scanning whatever lies hidden 
within the folds of the heart of 
childhood. He knew children 
through and through because 
themselves and not from books." 

A similar understanding of childhood was possessed 
by Field's contemporary, James Whitcomb Riley. He 
was born in Greenfield, Indiana, in 1853. His schooling 
was desultory ; and the only schoolbook which could hold 
his attention was the Reader with its alluring lyrics. At 
sixteen he broke away from home, and wandered off with 
an itinerant physician, for whom he painted advertisements. 
A little later he joined two or three other young men 
who went about the country, painting signs and giving 




James Whitcomb Riley 

he studied them from 



234 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

concerts of an unpretending character. Riley varied the 
program of simple songs by his recitations. 

At first he was content to repeat the poems already 
popular on the platform ; but as he delivered them again 
and again he became dissatisfied with their inconsistencies 
of word and sentiment ; and he began modestly to write 
character sketches in rime derived from his own observa- 
tion of life and adjusted to his own powers of impersona- 
tion. He was able early to see and to seize the poetry 
which lies latent in the commonplace, in the everyday life 
of the average village. The monologues he put together 
for his own recitation were portrayals of obvious rustic 
types, dramatic in their self-revelation, and heightened in 
color by the use of the dialect of the unlettered Indiana 
farmers. In these character sketches there is often robust 
gayety and gentle irony ; but there is never any satire or 
any harshness. There is frequently present also a simple 
pathos, unforced, unstrained, hinted at rather than paraded 
or insisted on. 

Even in his earlier efforts he is always sincere, with a 
simplicity as direct as Longfellow's. As he advanced in 
skill he remained resolute in his refusal to be artificial ; 
he was able to conceal his elaborate metrical artistry, 
his dexterous command over sounds, his adroit craftsman- 
ship ; and he succeeded in making his most ingeniously 
articulated stanzas seem to be unpremeditated and inevita- 
ble. In painting his rustic portraits his touch is at once 
firm and easy ; and he often suggests far more than he 
says, leaving his hearers to fill out the outline from their 
own familiarity with the model. 

For several years Riley worked on one or another of the 
newspapers of Indiana. It was in these journals that he 
first published his earlier poems, crediting them to an 



EUGENE FIELD AND JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 235 

imaginary farmer, Benjamin F. Johnson of Boone County. 
The first selection of his local verse, '' The Old Swimmin' 
Hole and 'Leven More Poems," issued in 1883, was sent 
forth as if it had been written by the non-existent Johnson. 
Riley's later collections of lyrics were authenticated by 
his own name, — '* Pipes o' Pan at Zekesbury " in 1889, 
*' Rhymes of Childhood " in 1891, ''Poems Here at Home " 
in 1893. He published also half a dozen volumes of prose 
sketches, which did not win the wide popular appreciation 
accorded to his verse. 

While his reputation was naturally greatest in his native 
state, it soon spread throughout the Union ; and he was 
encouraged to visit the Atlantic coast and to take part in 
Authors' Readings. At one time with Mark Twain, and 
at another with Eugene Field, he formed a partnership 
for a lecture tour. His convincing delivery of his own 
compositions was keenly enjoyed by all sorts and condi- 
tions of men in all parts of the country, — the cultivated 
as well as the less educated, both competent to feel the 
charm, the grace, and the genuineness of his impersona- 
tions. But although he wandered through many states, 
he kept returning to Indiana where he always felt most 
at home; and it was in Indianapolis that he died on July 
22, 1916. 

Riley's themes were generally homely and even humble ; 
and he was prone to use dialect as a device for enriching 
the local color of his character sketches. He was never 
tempted to draw his illustrations from books, content to 
rely on his own intimacy with nature and with human 
nature, and to deal exclusively with the persons and the 
places, the times and the seasons he had himself observed. 
But although his own writings were never bookish, he had 
an unfailing admiration for the lyrics of Shakspere and 



236 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

Herrick, Tennyson and Longfellow. He studied their 
methods and he made himself a master of versification. 
Yet his poems never smell of the lamp ; they seem to be 
spontaneous, because the poet had the art of concealing 
his art. Consider this final stanza of one of his best- 
known lyrics and note how admirably the sound is mar- 
ried to the sense : — 

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn, 
And the raspin^ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn ; 
The stubble in the furries — kindo' lonesome-like, but still 
A-preachin^ sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill ; 
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed ; 
The hosses in theyr stalls below — the clover overhead! — 
O, it sets my heart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock. 
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock. 

There is a bolder pathos and an almost equal felicity 
of phrasing in the Hues '* On the Death of Little Mahala 
Ashcraft": — 

" Little Haly ! Little Haly ! " cheeps the robin in the tree ; 
^^ Little Haly!" sighs the clover, '' Little Haly!" moans the bee; 
" Little Haly! Little Haly ! " calls the killdeer at twilight ; 
And the Katydids and crickets hollers -' Haly " all the night. 

They's sorrow in the waivin' leaves of all the apple trees; 
And sorrow in the harvest-sheaves, and sorrow in the breeze; 
And sorrow in the twitter of the swallers 'round the shed ; 
And all the song her redbird sings is " Little Haly's dead!" 

He is never awkward in rhythm or in rime ; he is never 
forced or false in feeling ; his tender sentiment never 
sinks into mere sentimentality ; and his verse is never 
morbid or in a minor key. He is an imaginative reaHst 
with a wholesome gladness, due in part, it may be, to his 
sustaining intimacy with the fields and the streams, the 



4 



EUGENE FIELD AND JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY 237 

birds and the flowers of his own state and in part to his 
interpretative sympathy with the men and the women and 
the children he had known from his youth up. Like 
Longfellow in his simplicity and in his love for children 
and in his understanding of their little world, he is also 
like Whittier in his directness. In fact Riley did for the 
rustic life of the Middle West what Whittier had done for 
the rustic life of New England. 

Questions. — Why did the earlier story-tellers deal exclusively with 
life along the Atlantic Coast ? 

What is the chief character created by J. C Harris? 

From what group were the characters of Bret Harte sketched? 

What was Eugene Field's preparation for literature? 

What aspect of life was Field most successful in depicting? 

How did James Whitcomb Riley come to write verse? 

What types of character did he delineate most successfully? 

Note. — The complete edition of Bret Harte is published by Houghton Mifflin, 
and complete editions of Field and Riley's poems are issued by Scribner. " The 
Life of Bret Harte" by H. C. Merwin is pubhshed by Houghton Mifflin. The 
" Life of William G. Simms " by William P. Trent appears in the American Men 
of Letters Series (Houghton Mifflin). Slason Thompson's biography of Eugene 
Field is published by Scribner. 



XIX OTHER WRITERS 






In certain respects Parkman must be admitted to be the 
foremost American historian ; but he was only the most 
interesting of a distinguished group of historical writers. 
In 1834 Jared Sparks (i 789-1 866) wrote a life of Wash- 
ington and edited the letters and other papers of our 
first President; and he afterward did a like service for 
_ other worthies of the Revolutionary- 

period. He preserved for us much valu- 
able material which might otherwise have 
been lost ; but he liked to show his heroes 
always in full dress, and he omitted facts 
and altered texts the better to sustain the 
dignity of history as he understood it. 

In the same year that Sparks published 
the first volume of his '' Washington," 
George Bancroft (i 800-1 891) issued the 
first volume of his massive '' History of 
the United States," a monument of honorable labor and 
intellectual effort, the tenth and last volume of which was 
not completed until 1874 — forty years after the book had 
begun to appear. Bancroft also took part in public affairs, 
and when Secretary of the Navy he established the Naval 
Academy now at AnnapoHs. When collector of the port of 
Boston he gave an appointment to Hawthorne. He was 
also minister to Great Britain in 1846, and twenty years 
later he was minister to Germany. 

Another historian, John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877), 
was our minister to Austria at one time and afterward to 

238 




George Bancroft 



OTHER WRITERS 



239 



Great Britain. He chose for the subject of his studies 
the rise of the brave little Dutch republic from which the 
people of the United States have derived so many of their 
institutions. The first book he devoted to this thrilling 
theme was pubUshed in 1854. After his death his life was 
written by his friend, Dr. Holmes. 

An even more interesting period of history was selected 
by William Hickling Prescott (i 796-1 859), who examined 
the condition of Spain at the time 
Columbus set forth to discover a 
new world. This book on *' Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella " was published in 
1837, ^^^ it was followed within ten 
years by books on the Spanish '' Con- 
quest of Mexico " and *'^ Conquest of 
Peru," two of the most marvelous 
true stories to be found anywhere in 
the annals of mankind. 

John Fiske (1842-1901) turned 
aside from the study of philosophy 

to the reteUing of American history. He wrote an illumi- 
nating account of the ''Discovery of America"; and he 
considered in detail the more picturesque periods of the 
annals of the United States in separate studies devoted 
to the '* Beginnings of New England," *' Old Virginia 
and Her Neighbors," '' New France and New England," 
the ''Dutch and Quaker Colonies," and the "American 
Revolution." 

Of even more importance and of wider significance was 
a succession of volumes devoted to the influence of sea- 
power upon history. They were written by Alfred T. 
Mahan (1840-1914) a graduate of the Naval Academy 
who rose to the rank of admiral. It is not too much to 




William H. Prescott 



240 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

say that Mahan's books were epoch-making and that they 
exerted a permanent influence upon the authorities of 
every maritime nation. He also wrote biographies of the 
two greatest of modern sea-fighters, Nelson and Farragut. 
Among the other writers who distinguished themselves 
in other fields than history, there were poets and story- 
tellers, essayists and critics, some of them in New Eng- 
land and some in the Middle States. Fitz-Greene Halleck 
( 1 790-1 867) and Joseph Rodman Drake (i 795-1 820) 
joined forces in 18 19 in a series of occasional poems. 
Drake wrote the stirring address to the *' American Flag '* 
beginning — 

When Freedom from her mountain height, 

Unfurled her standard to the air, 
She tore the azure robe of night, 

And set the stars of glory there. 

The final lines as he originally drafted them were 
these : — 

And fixed as yonder orb divine, 

That saw thy bannered blaze unfurled, 
Shall thy proud stars resplendent shine. 
The guard and glory of the world. 

Instead of these noble lines Halleck suggested a final 
quatrain of his own, which Drake accepted, although it 
is obviously inferior in vigor and in veracity : — 

Forever float that standard sheet! 

Where breathes the foe but falls before us, 
With Freedom^s soil beneath our feet, 

And Freedom^s banner streaming o'er us? 

Drake had earlier written in 18 16 a charming poem, 
called the '* Culprit Fay," in which he tried to show that 
the rivers of America were as well fitted for poetic treat- 
ment as the rivers of Scotland. Halleck's best-known 



il 



OTHER WRITERS 



241 



lyric is the resonant ** Marco Bozzaris " ; but when Drake 
died, at the early age of twenty-five, his friend, who was 
to survive him nearly half a century, composed a beautiful 
lament, beginning — 

Green be the turf above thee, 

Friend of my better days ! 
None knew thee but to love thee, 

Nor named thee but to praise. 

A friend of Motley's and the editor of his letters was 
George William Curtis (i 824-1 892), who was perhaps after 
Lowell the most charming of American essayists. Curtis 
wrote a novel or two and a social satire ; he was for years 
a popular lecturer ; but his strength is best revealed in the 
many addresses he delivered, in which he upheld a lofty 
ideal of American citizenship. Three other essayists may 
also be mentioned here, George Ripley (i 802-1 880), who 
took part in the Brook Farm experiment with Hawthorne 
and Curtis, and who did much to further 
scholarship in the United States ; E. P. 
Whipple (18 19-1886), who was a Boston 
lecturer and critic ; and Richard Grant 
White ( 1 821-1885), who edited Shak- 
spere's works and who wrote frequently 
about the misuse of words. 

Critics and essayists were the two 
poets Bayard Taylor and E. C. Sted- 
man. Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was 
also a journalist, who began his Hterary 
career by letters of travel. He wished 
always to be a poet, but perhaps his most valuable poetic 
effort was his metrical translation of Goethe's '' Faust." 
Stedman (1833-1908) was a poet of genuine faculty who 
left journalism for business and who later prepared two 




Bayard Taylor 



242 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 




Edmund C- Stedman 



volumes of illuminating literary criticism, ** Victorian 
Poets " and ** Poets of America." Two Southern poets 
must not be passed over, Henry Timrod 
(1829-1867) and Sidney Lanier (i 842- 
1881), both of whom died before their 
allotted time, partly because of the weak- 
ness brought on by exposure while they 
were fighting for the lost cause. 

Greater than any of these was Walt 
Whitman (1819-1892), who is even 
called by some foreign critics the great- 
est of all American poets. Whitman 
was an intense American, renouncing 
all allegiance to the past and looking to the future with 
splendid confidence. His stalwart verse was irregular, 
but often it was beautifully rhythmic. No one of the 
many tributes to Lincoln, not 
even Lowell's noble eulogy, is 
more deeply charged with ex- 
alted feeling than Whitman's ** O 
Captain, My Captain." 

Although not to be classed as 
fiction, one book published in the 
first half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury has all the fascination of 
Cooper's sea stories. This roman- 
tic narrative of the ocean is the 
** Two Years before the Mast '" of 
Richard H. Dana (1815-1882), 
which has been called ' the most 
truthful account of the everyday 
life of the American sailor that has ever been written. 
Bryant declared it to be '' as good as ' Robinson Crusoe.' " 




Walt Whitman 



t 



OTHER WRITERS 243 

Certain of the women writers of the United States have 
attained distinction as poets and as novelists. The earliest 
of them was Mrs. Rowson (i 762-1 824), who wrote the 
pathetic tale of "Charlotte Temple"; and among the 
latest were Helen Hunt Jackson (1831-1885) and Con- 
stance Fenimore Woolson (1848- 1894). Mrs. Jackson 
wrote many books in prose and in verse, but she is best 
known by her moving appeal for the Indian — an appeal 
cast in the form of a story and called '' Ramona." Miss 
Woolson was a grand-niece of Cooper's, and she had not a 
little of his skill in setting down on paper the impression 
of natural scenery. Her most artistic books are, perhaps, 
the two volumes of short stories, in one of which she studied 
life in the South, and in the other of which she depicted 
the people who dwell on the shores of the great lakes. 

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a critic, having high 
ideals of life and of literature. She was a friend of 
Emerson's and helped to edit the Dial ; and she was a 
visitor to Brook Farm, while Hawthorne and Curtis and 
Ripley were there. She died in her prime, being ship- 
wrecked off Fire Island as she was returning from Europe 
with her baby and her husband, an Italian named Ossoli. 

A woman was also the author of the American book 
which has had the widest circulation both at home and 
abroad, both in English and in translations into foreign 
languages. Perhaps to-day on the continent of Europe 
'' Uncle Tom's Cabin " is better known than any other 
single book of American authorship. It was written by 
Harriet Beecher Stowe ( 181 1-1896). As a girl she taught 
school in Cincinnati and had many opportunities of study- 
ing Southern life. She married Mr. Stowe in 1836 and 
moved with him to Maine in 1850. She had a deep 
feeling against slavery and she thought that everybody 




244 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

would agree with her if only the results of the evil system 

were understood. 

What she tried to do in " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was 

not to attack slavery but rather to tell the truth about 

it, so that others would see it as she saw it She sought 
to show the good side as well as the 
bad side ; she described the good 
slave owner and the bad slave owner ; 
she depicted the good slave and the 
bad slave. She was so free from 
any hatred of the slave owner him- 
self that the pleasantest character 
in the book is St. Clair, the charm- 
ing Southern gentleman, while the 
coarsest figure of all is the brutal 

Harriet Beecher Stowe t^t i ^ • 

Northern slave driver Legree. It 
was the system she detested and not the men and women 
who might be involved in it. This wish to be truthful it is 
which gives its abiding value to '* Uncle Tom's Cabin " 
and which has obtained for it a life far longer than that 
of other " novels with a purpose," wherein there is no 
attempt to set down the facts as they are and let these 
speak for themselves. 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich(i 836-1907) and Richard Watson 
Gilder (1844- 1 909) were lyric poets of undeniable charm 
although not of the highest power. Gilder was long the 
editor of a leading magazine, and he won distinction also 
as the ardent advocate of many needed reforms. Aldrich 
was a story-teller as well as a lyrist, carrying into fiction 
the ingenious fantasy which characterized his verse. He 
is best known by his exquisite short story, " Marjorie 
Daw," and by his vivacious ** Story of a Bad Boy," which 
is almost autobiographic. 



OTHER WRITERS 245 

Henry James (1843- 19 16) was an acute critic of modern 
literature and a novelist of a richly developed individuality. 
At first he was most interested in presenting international 
contrasts of character, Americans in Europe and Euro- 
peans in America. Born in New York, he spent the later 
years of his life mainly in England ; and a few months 
before his death he renounced his American citizenship 
and became a British subject. As he matured he devoted 
himself more frankly to the subtler intricacies of human 
conduct ; and his style lost its clarity, becoming curiously 
involved and hesitating. 

Among the other story-tellers who were contemporary 
with James and Aldrich, it must suffice here merely to 
note the names of Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902), 
F. Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915), F. Marion Crawford 
(1854-1909), Henry Cuyler Bunner (1855-1896), Jack 
London (1876-1916), and *' O. Henry" (1867-1910) whose 
real name was Sydney Porter. 

Questions. — Mention three of the earliest American historians, 
and state the themes they dealt with. 

Mention two later historians, and specify also their topics. 
1 1 Name the most important poems by Halleck and Drake. 

I Mention two critics who were at Brook Farm. 

Why are Taylor and Stedman remembered ? 

What do you know about Walt Whitman ? 

What did Margaret Fuller do ? 

Discuss the chief book of the most widely known of American 
authoresses. 

Name the chief book by Aldrich. 

Discuss the modification of manner to be noted in the literary 
career of Henry James. 

Note.— Biographies of Curtis, Ripley, Prescott, Margaret Fuller, Bayard 
Taylor, and Walt Whitman are to be found in the American Men of Letters series. 
The life of Motley by Oliver W endell Holmes is published by Houghton Mifflin. 



XX BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH 
CENTURY 

The death of Holmes in the fall of 1894, following fast 
upon the deaths of Whittier and of Parkman and of Lowell, 
marked the close of an epoch. The leaders of the great 
New England group of authors had gone ; and the period 
of American literature which they had made illustrious 
was completed. In the first half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the literary center of the United States had been in 
New York, where were Irving and Cooper and Bryant. 
Toward the middle of the century the literary center had 
shifted to Boston, in which city or in its immediate vicinity 
were the homes of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, 
Parkman, Lowell, and Thoreau. When these had de- 
parted they left no successors there of the same relative 
influence. The nation has been spreading so fast and 
the men of letters are so scattered, that there is in the early 
years of the twentieth century no single group of authors 
whose position at the head of American literature is 
beyond question. 

Although there have never been so many authors as 
there are to-day, and although the average of literary skill 
is probably higher than ever before, there is now no tower- 
ing figure and no dominating personahty. And those who 
are at the head of American literature in the early years 
of the twentieth century are not men of the same type 
as the greatly-gifted New Englanders whom they suc- 
ceeded ; and their aims and their ideals are not the same. 
They have not the binding tie of birth in the same part of 
the country, for they come from the South and from the 

246 



BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 247 

West as well as from the East. In so far as the nation has 
any literary center, this must be New York again, although 
there is no common bond of union among the many promi- 
nent authors living in the metropoHs, and although not a 
few writers of prominence prefer Boston or Washington or 
Chicago. 

After the death of Lowell and Whittier and Holmes 
there was left no poet having, as they all three had, at 
once a high standing and a wide popularity. Poets there 
are of lofty aspiration and of delicate skill. Other writ- 
ers of verse there are also who rimed adroitly the com- 
mon things of life, using the common speech of the peo- 
ple of their own State. The praise of those best qualified 
to judge has been given rather to the poets of the first cf 
these groups, while it is the verses of the writers of the 
second group which have been most warmly welcomed by 
the people as a whole. 

Here we find the most marked difference between the 
poetry of the middle of the last century and that of the 
present. The best poems of Longfellow and Whittier 
delighted all classes of Americans ; they pleased the plain 
people as well as the more highly cultivated. '* Evange- 
line " and '' Snow-Bound " charmed alike the farmhand and 
the college professor. But no long poem published re- 
cently has achieved this double distinction. Of course 
such a poem may appear at any moment, but with the 
increasing vogue of fiction, poetry seems less preemi- 
nent than it was in the past. Seventy-five years ago 
nearly all the writers who stood at the head of Ameri- 
can literature were poets. Of the writers who stand 
at the head of American literature to-day less than half 
are poets. 

There is no dearth of poetry ; perhaps it has never been 



248 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

SO abundant in America as it is to-day. Its technical 
merit is undeniable, for never has the accomplishment 
of verse been possessed by more writers. But perhaps 
fame is not now won so swiftly by a beautiful lyric as 
it is by a striking short-story. Therefore the ambitious 
young author is less tempted to confine himself to verse 
than he was half a century ago. Fiction is the form of 
literature in which many of the leading American authors 
are now more likely to find their natural medium of expres- 
sion. Both the novel and the short-story flourish now as 
never before. 

Two of the later developments of fiction are especially 
noteworthy. The first of these is what has been called 
the ** international novel." This name has been given to 
a study of American character seen against a foreign 
background. To bring out the difference between the 
American and the European — and more particularly 
the profound difference between the American and the 
Englishman — this has been the object of not a few novels 
written by American authors. By making this contrast 
these novelists performed a most useful service, for they 
helped us to see ourselves as others see us. They forced 
us to look at ourselves with alien eyes. They compelled 
us to recognize some of our own peculiarities to which we 
had chosen to be blind. 

Closely akin in method to the international novels have 
been certain novels of city life. In these stories the com- 
plex conditions of society in New York, in Boston, and in 
Chicago have been studied with conscientious care. Cer- 
tain aspects of the kaleidoscopic cosmopoHtanism of the 
great cities of the East have been seized by the novelist 
and by him so presented in his stories that the dweller on 
the lonely farm in the distant West is enabled to compre- 



BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 249 

hend better than before the conditions of life amid the 
shifting scenes of the mighty city. This, indeed, is the 
greatest service the art of fiction can render to mankind ; 
it helps us to understand our fellow-man ; it explains us to 
ourselves. 

To perform this service adequately, the aim of the 
novelist must be to tell the truth about life as he sees it. 
The aim of the greatest writers of fiction has not been 
merely to amuse by fanciful and fantastic tales, but to 
interpret sympathetically the life they themselves best 
knew. This is what has been done with remarkable suc- 
cess by many of the authors who have taken part in this 
noteworthy development of American fiction. 

Quite as interesting as the *' international novel" is the 
"local short-story." By this is meant the story in which 
we find set forth the people and the scenery and the dia- 
lect of a particular locality — in which there is a strong 
local flavor and a free use of local color. *' Rip Van 
Winkle" is the first tale of this type, in which there is a 
sympathetic study of the manners and customs of a special 
portion of our vast and mingled population. Hawthorne's 
brief tales present us with New England characters pro- 
jected against New England backgrounds. 

The example set by Irving has been followed by writers 
who happened to have special knowledge of this or that 
portion of the country, until there is now hardly a corner 
of the United States which has not served as the scene 
of a story of some sort. Many of these local fictions 
are short-stories, but some of them are long novels. As 
was natural, New England is the portion which has 
been most carefully explored. But of late the young 
writers of the South and of the West have been almost 
more successful in this department of literature than the 



250 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

writers of New England and of New York. In story and 
in sketch we have had made known to us the Southern 
gentleman of the old school, the old negro body-servant, 
the fieldhand, and the poor white. In like manner we 
have had faithfully observed and honestly presented to us 
the more marked types of Western character. What gives 
its real value to these studies of life in the South and in 
the West is that they are studies of life, that they have the 
note of sincerity and of reality, that they are not vain 
imaginings merely, but the result of an earnest effort to 
see life as it is and to tell the truth about it — the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth. 

Many of these Southern and Western tales, even more 
than the New York and New England tales on which they 
are modeled, abound in humor, which sometimes refines 
itself into delicate character-drawing, and which sometimes 
breaks out into more hearty fun. Franklin was perhaps 
the earliest of American humorists; after him came Irving, 
and then Lowell; and they have to-day many followers 
not unworthy of them. 

The earlier American historians, Prescott and Motley 
and Parkman, have also many honorable successors, 
working to-day as loyally as did their great predecessors. 
At no time since the United States became an independ- 
ent nation has there been greater interest in historical 
study. At no time have more able writers been devoting 
themselves to the history of our own country. 

Although we have now no essayist of the stimulating 
force of Emerson, and no critic with the insight and the 
equipment of Lowell, yet there is no lack of delightful 
essayists and of accomplished critics. Indeed, the gen- 
eral level of American criticism has been immensely raised 
since the days of Poe. American critics are far more self- 



BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 25 1 

reliant in the early years of the twentieth century than 
they were at the end of the nineteenth century. They 
have lost the colonial attitude, for they no longer look for 
Hght across the Atlantic to England only. They know 
now that American literature has to grow in its own way 
and of its own accord. Yet they are not so narrow as they 
were, and they are ready to apply far higher standards. 
An American poet or novelist or historian is not now either 
unduly praised or unduly condemned merely because he is 
an American. He is judged on his own merits, and he is 
compared with the leading contemporary writers of Eng- 
land, of France, and of other countries. It is by the loft- 
iest standards of the rest of the world that American 
literature must hereafter be measured. 

Questions. — Discuss the shifting of the literary center in the United 
States since the middle of the nineteenth century. 

What marked difference is to be found between the poetry of the 
middle of the nineteenth century and that of the present ? 

What is meant by the ^•international novel"? 

What is meant by the " local short-stor>' "? 

What is it that now gives abiding value to the best American fiction ? 

What is the present state of American literature in the departments 
of history and criticism ? 



A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 



OF 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



1613 
1616 
1620 
1624 

1636 

1639 
1640 



1607 . . . John Smith explored the Chesapeake Bay. 

Landing at Jamestown, April 26. 

1608 . . . John Smith : " A True Relation of Such Occurrences and 

Accidents of Note as hath Happened in Virginia." 
Quebec founded. 

Anne Bradstreet born. 



John Smith : "A Description of New England." 

Landing of the Pilgrims. 

John Smith (with others) : "The General History of Vir- 
ginia, New England, and the Summer Isles." 

Harvard College founded. 

Increase Mather born. 

Richard Mather, John Eliot, and other Chief Divines in 
the Country : " The Whole Book of Psalms Faithfully 
Translated into English Metre." (The Bay Psalm 
Book.) 

1650 . . . Anne Bradstreet: "The Tenth Muse lately Sprung up in 
America." 

1661 . . . John Eliot : Translation of the New Testament into Algon- 
quin. 

1663 . . . Cotton Mather born. 

1672 . . . Anne Bradstreet died. 

1689 . . . Cotton Mather : "Memorable Providences relating to 
Witchcrafts and Possessions." 
252 



A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 



253 



1691 . . . Joshua Scottow : " The New England Primer." 

1700 . . . Yale College founded. 

1702 . . . Cotton Mather : ^'Magnalia Christ! Americana." 

^7^3 • • • Jonathan Edwards born. 

1 704 . . . T/ie Boston News-Letter established. 

1706 . . Benjamin Franklin born. 

1 7 10 . . . Cotton Mather: ^' Bonifacius ; an Essay upon the Good 
^ that is to be Devised and Designed.'' 

1 719 . . . The Boston G^s"^//^ established. 

1721 . . . James Franklin : The New England Courant. 

1723 . . . Increase Mather died. 

1728 .. . Cotton Mather died. 

1732 . . . Franklin: " Poor Richard's Almanack." 

1737 . . . Thomas Paine born. 

1743 . . . Thomas Jefferson born. 

1745 . . . John Jay born. 

1746 . . . Princeton College founded. 

1749 . . . University of Pennsylvania founded. 

1750 . . . Franklin: ^* Hypothesis for Explaining the Several Phe- 

nomena of Thunder Gusts ; Opinions and Conjectures 
Concerning the Properties and Effects of the Electrical 
Matter." 

1 75 1 . . . James Madison born. 

1752 . . . Gouverneur Morris born. 

1754 . . . Jonathan Edwards: ^^ Freedom of the Will." 

King's College founded — now Columbia University. 

1757 . . . Alexander Hamilton born. 

1758 . . . Franklin: " Father Abraham's Speech." 

Jonathan Edwards died. 

1762 . . Mrs. Rowson born. 

1764 . . . College of Rhode Island founded — now Brown University. 



254 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 



1769 . . . Dartmouth College founded. 

1771 . . . Franklin: First five chapters of '' Autobiography " written. 
Charles Brockden Brown born. 

1776 . . . Jefferson: "The Declaration of Independence." 
Paine: " Common Sense.'' 

1782 . . . First English Bible published in America (at Philadelphia). 

Daniel Webster born. 

1783 . . . Washington Irving born. 

1787 . . . Jefferson: "Notes on the State of Virginia." 

1788 ... Hamilton (with Madison and Jay) : " The Federalist." 

1789 . . . Franklin: "Autobiography'' from 1757 to 1759 (written) 

James Fenimore Cooper and Jared Sparks born. 

1790 . . . Fitz-Greene Halleck born. 

Franklin died. 

1794 . . . William Cullen Bryant born. 

1795 . . . Lindley Murray : " English Grammar." 

Joseph Rodman Drake and John P. Kennedy born. 

1796 . . . Prescott born. 

1800 . . . Daniel Webster : " Fourth of July Speech." 
George Bancroft born. 

1802 . . . Bowdoin College founded. 

George Ripley born. 

1803 . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson born. 

1804 . . . Hawthorne born. 

Hamilton died. 

1806 . . . Noah Webster: "Compendious Dictionary of the English 

Language." 
Nathaniel P. Willis and William Gilmore Simms born. 

1807 . . . Henry W. Longfellow and John G. Whittier born. 

1808 . . . Bryant: " The Embargo." 

1809 . . Irving : " History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker." 

Paine died. 



A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 



255 



1809 . , Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abraham Lincoln, and Edgar Allan 

Poe born. 

1 8 10 . . . Margaret Fuller born. 

Charles Brockden Brown died. 

181 2 . . . Harriet Beecher (Stowe) born. 

1 8 14 . . . Motley born. 

1815 . . . Richard H. Dana born. 

1816 . . . Drake: ^^ The Culprit Fay." 

Gouverneur Morris died. 

18 1 7 . . . Bryant: *' Thanatopsis '' (in the A^^r/>^ A7nericati Review), 

Thoreau born. 

1819 . . . Drake and Halleck : '* The Croaker Poems." 
Herman Melville born. 
Irving: "The Sketch Book.'' 

James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, and E. P. Whipple 
born. 

i82D . . . Cooper: "Precaution." 
Drake died. 

1821 . . . Bryant: "Poems."" 

Cooper : " The Spy." 
Richard Grant White born. 

1822 . . . Irving: " Bracebridge Hall." 

Ulysses S. Grant born. 

1823 - . . Cooper: " The Pilot," and "The Pioneers." 

Francis Parkman born. 

1824 . . . Irving: " Tales of a Traveler." 

George W. Curtis born. 

1825 . . . Webster: " First Bunker Hill Oration." 

Bayard Taylor born. 

1826 . . . Cooper: " The Last of the Mohicans." 

Jefferson died. 

1827 . . . Cooper: " The Prairie." 

Poe : " Tamerlane and Other Poems." 



II 



2S6 AMERICAN LITERATURE. 

1829 . . . Cooper: " The Red Rover." 

Irving: " The Conquest of Granada." 

Henry Timrod born. 

Poe : '* Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems." 

1830 . . . Cooper: '• The Water Witch.'' 

Webster: *• Reply to Hayne." 

1831 . . . Irving: " The Companions of Columbus." 

Whittier : '' Legends of New England." 

1832 . . . Irving: " The Alfeaiabra " 

Sparks: ** Life of Gouverneur Morris." 
Kennedy : '' Swallow Barn." 

1833 . . . Longfellow: ^* Outre-Mer." 

Whittier : '' Justice and Expediency." 

Louisa M. Alcott and Edmund C. Stedman born. 

1834 ... Bancroft : '' History of the United States." 

Jared Sparks : " Life of Washington." 

1835 . . . Simms: " The Yemassee." 

Samuel L. Clemens born. 

Kennedy : " Horse-Shoe Robinson." 

1836 . . . Emerson: "Nature." 

Holmes : '^ Poems." 
Madison died. 

1837 . . . Hawthorne: "Twice-Told Tales" (first series). 

Prescott : " Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella." 
Emerson : Address on the " American Scholar." 
John Burroughs, Edward Eggleston, and William D. Howells 
born. 

1838 ... Poe: "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym." 

Whittier: "Ballads and Antislavery Poems." 

1839 • • • Cooper: " History of the Navy of the United States " 

Longfellow : " Hyperion," and " Voices of the Night." 
Bret Harte born. 

1840 . . . Cooper: " The Pathfinder." 

R. H. Dana, Jr. : " Two Years before the Mast." ' 



A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 257 

1840 .. . . Poe ; " Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque." 

Brook Farm Community established. 

1841 - . . Cooper; " The Deerslayer." 

Emerson • " Essays '' (first series) . 
Longfellow : '' Ballads and Other Poems." 
Lowell: "A Years Life.'' 
Poe : *' The Murders in the Rue Morgue." 
University of Michigan opened. 

1842 . . . Bryant : '' The Fountain and Other Poems." 

Cooper: "The Two Admirals,'' and ^-Wing-and-Wing." 
Holmes : " Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions.'' 
Hawthorne : *• Twice-Told Tales '' (second series). 
Longfellow^ : " Poems on Slavery." 
Sidney Lanier born. 
John Fiske born. 

1843 • • • Longfellow: "The Spanish Student." 

Prescott : " History of the Conquest of Mexico." 
Poe : " The Gold Bug." 

Whittier : " Lays of My Home and Other Poems." 
Webster: " Second Bunker Hill Oration." 

1844 . . . Emerson: "Essays" (second series). 

Lowell : " A Legend of Brittany." 

1845 .. . Lowell: " Conversations on Some of the Old Poets." 

Poe : " The Raven and Other Poems." 

1846 . . . Hawthorne: " Mosses from an Old Manse." 

Holmes : "Urania." 

Longfellow : " The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems." 

Emerson : " Poems." 

Melville : " Typee." 

Poe: "The Bells." 

1847 . . . Longfellow : " Evangeline." 

Prescott : " History of the Conquest of Peru." 

1848 . , . Lowell: "The Biglow Papers" (first series); "A Fable 

for Critics," and "The Vision of Sir Launfal." 
Poe : " Eureka, a Prose Poem." 



258 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

1848 . . . Whipple: ^' Essays and Reviews." 

Constance Fenimore Woolson born. 

1849 . . . Emerson: ^* Miscellanies.'" 

Irving: "Goldsmith.'' 

Longfellow: '^Kavanagh." 

Parkman : ^^ The Oregon Trail/' 

Thoreau : " A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers." 

Whittier : '' Voices of Freedom." 

Foe died. 

1850 . . . Bryant: " Letters of a Traveler." 

Emerson : ** Representative Men." 

Hawthorne: ** The Scarlet Letter." 

Irving: *' Life of Mahomet and his Successors." 

Longfellow : " The Seaside and the Fireside." 

Donald G. Mitchell : " Reveries of a Bachelor." 

Whittier : •* Songs of Labor." 

Margaret Fuller died. 

1851 . . . Hawthorne : "The House of the Seven Gables," "A Wonder- 

Book for Boys and Girls." 
Longfellow: "The Golden Legend." 
Parkman : " History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac." 
Cooper died. 

1852 . . . Hawthorne: " The Blithedale Romance," and " The Snow 

Image and Other Twice-Told Tales." 
Harriet Beecher Stowe : " Uncle Tom's Cabin." 
Daniel Webster died. 

1853 . . . Curtis: " The Potiphar Papers." 

Hawthorne : " Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls." 

1854 . . . Thoreau: "Walden." 

1855 . . . Irving: " Life of Washington," and "' Wolfert's Roost." 

Longfellow : " Hiawatha." 
Whitman : " Leaves of Grass." 

1856 . . . Curtis: "Prueandl." 

Emerson : " English Traits." 

Motley: "The Rise of the Dutch Republic." 

1858 . . . Holmes: " The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table." 
Longfellow : " The Courtship of Miles Standish." 



I 



A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 259 

1859 . . . Bryant: "Letters from Spain and Other Countries." 
Irving and Prescott died. 

i860 . . . Emerson: ** The Conduct of Life." 
Hawthorne: ^' The Marble Faun." 
Motley : *• United Netherlands." 
Whittier : '' Home Ballads.*' 
Holmes : '* The Professor at the Breakfast Table." 

1861 . . . Holmes: " Elsie Venner," and ^* Songs in Many Keys." 

1862 . . . Thoreau died. 

1863 . . . Bryant: "Thirty Poems." 

Hawthorne : " Our Old Home." 

Thoreau: "Excursions." 

Longfellow : •' Tales of a Wayside Inn." 

Whittier : " In War Time." 

Lincoln : " Gettysburg Oration." 

1864 . . . Lowell: " Fireside Travels." 

Thoreau : " The Maine Woods." 
Hawthorne died. 

1865 . . . Parkman : " Pioneers of France in the New World." 

Thoreau : " Cape Cod." 
Lincoln died. 

1866 . . . Thoreau: "A Yankee in Canada." 

Whittier: "Snow-Bound." 
Jared Sparks died. 

1867 . . . S. L. Clemens: " The Celebrated Jumping Frog." 

Holmes: "The Guardian Angel." 

Lanier: "Tiger Lilies." 

Longfellow : Translation of Dante. 

Lowell: "The Biglow Papers'* (second series). 

Whittier: " The Tent on the Beach.'* 

Parkman : " The Jesuits in North America." 

Halleck, Willis, and Timrod died. 

1868 . . . Louisa M. Alcott : " Little Women." 

Hawthorne : " Passages from American Notebooks." 
Whittier: " Among the Hills/' 

1869 .. . Aldrich: "The Story of a Bad Boy." 



26o AMERICAN LITERATURE 

1869 . . . S. L. Clemens: "Innocents Abroad." 

Lowell : '' Under the Willows,'^ and " The Cathedral." 

Parkman : " La Salle." 

Harriet Beecher Stowe : "Old Town Folks." 

1870 . . . Bryant: Translation of the " Iliad." 

Emerson: " Society and Solitude." 

Bret Harte : " The Luck of Roaring Camp." 

Hawthorne: "English Notebooks." 

Lowell : " Among My Books." 

Bayard Taylor: Translation of the first part of "Faust." 

Whitman : " Democratic Vistas." 

Whittier: "Miriam," and "Ballads of New England." 

J. P. Kennedy and W. G. Simms died. 

1871 . . . Louisa M. Alcott : " Little Men." 

Burroughs: "Wake-Robin." 
Eggleston : "The Hoosier Schoolmaster." 
Hawthorne : " French and Italian Notebooks." 
Howells : " Their Wedding Journey." 
Longfellow : " The Divine Tragedy." 
Lowell : " My Study Windows." 

1872 . . . S. L. Clemens: "Roughing It." 

Holmes : "The Poet at the Breakfast Table." 
Longfellow : " Three Books of Song." 
Whittier: "The Pennsylvania Pilgrim." 

1873 . . . Aldrich: " Marjorie Daw." 

1874 . . . Holmes: " Songs of Many Seasons." 

Howells : " A Foregone Conclusion." 
Longfellow : " The Hanging of the Crane." 
Parkman: "The Old Regime in Canada." 
Whittier : " Hazel Blossoms," and " Mabel Martin." 

1875 . . . Burroughs: "Winter Sunshine." 

Emerson : " Letters and Social Aims." 
Longfellow : " The Masque of Pandora." 
W. T. Sherman: "Memoirs." 
Stedman : " Victorian Poets." 

1876 . . . S. L. Clemens: "Tom Sawyer." 






A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 261 

1876 . . . Sidney Lanier : "Poems.'' 

Lowell : " Three Memorial Poems." 
Johns Hopkins University opened. 

1877 . . . Burroughs: ^' Birds and Poets." 

Parkman : " Count Frontenac."" 
Motley died. 

1878 . . . Holmes: "Motley." 

James : " French Poets and Novelists." 
Longfellow: "Keramos.'' 
Whittier: " The Vision of Echard." 
Bryant and Bayard Taylor died. 

1879 • • • Cable : " Old Creole Days." 

James : " An International Episode." 
Stockton : " Rudder Grange." 

1880 . . . Cable: "The Grandissimes." 

Joel Chandler Harris : " Uncle Remus." 
Holmes : " The Iron Gate." 
Howells : " The Undiscovered Country." 
Longfellow : " Ultima Thule." 
George Ripley died. 

1881 . . . Whittier: " The King's Missive." 

Sidney Lanier died. 

1882 ... S. L. Clemens : "The Prince and the Pauper." 

F. Marion Crawford: "Mr. Isaacs." 
Howells: "A Modern Instance." 
Longfellow : "In the Harbor." 
Lounsbury : "James Fenimore Cooper." 
Emerson, Longfellow, and R. H. Dana died. 

1883 . . . S. L. Clemens: "Life on the Mississippi." 

J. Whitcomb Riley: "The Old Swimmin'-Hole." 
Whittier : " The Bay of Seven Islands." 

1884 . . . H. C. Bunner: "Airs from Arcady." 

Cable : " The Creoles of Louisiana." 
S. L. Clemens: " Huckleberry Finn." 
Helen Hunt Jackson : " Ramona." 
Parkman : " Montcalm and Wolfe." 



262 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

1885 . . . U. S. Grant: *^ Personal Memoirs/' 

Howeils : •* The Rise of Silas Lapham." 
Stedman : '' Poets of America." 

U. S. Grant, Richard Grant White, and Helen Hunt Jackson 
died. 

1886 . . . Frances Hodgson Burnett : " Little Lord Faiintleroy." 

Lowell: ^'Democracy and Other Addresses.'"* 

1887 . . . Stedman: " Library of American Literature." 

Mary E. Wilkins : " A Humble Romance." 

1888 . . . Holmes: " Before the Curfew." 

Lowell: " Political Essays." 
Riley : " Old-Fashioned Roses." 
Louisa M. Alcott died. 

1889 . . . Burroughs: " Indoor Studies." 

Howeils : " A Hazard of New Fortunes.*" 
Roosevelt : " The Winning of the West." 

1890 . . . Holmes : " Over the Teacups." 

Mahan : " The Influence of Sea-Power upon History," 
Nicolay and Hay: "'Abraham Lincoln." 

1891 . . . Garland: " Main-traveled Roads." ' 

Howeils: *" Criticism and Fiction." 
Lowell : " Latest Literary Essays." 
Bancroft, Lowell, and Melville died. 

1892 . . . Lowell: "The Old English Dramatists." 

Parkman: "A Half Century of Conflict." 
Stedman : " The Nature and Elements of Poetry." 
Whittier: "At Sundown." 
G. W. Curtis, Whittier, and Whitman died. 
University of Chicago opened. 

1893 . . . Fuller: " The Cliff Dwellers." 

Parkman died. 

1894 . . . S. L. Clemens: " Puddnhead Wilson." 

Holmes and Constance Fenimore Woolson died. 

1895 . . . Fuller: ^" With the Procession."' 

Roosevelt and Lodge : *' Hero Tales of American History " 



A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY 



263 



1896 . . . Mrs. H. B. Stowe and H. C. Bunner died. 

1897 . . . Eliot: '^ American Contributions to Civilization.'" 

Roosevelt: ''American Ideals.'* 

1898 . . . Seton-Thompson : ''Wild Animals I have Known. ■•' 

1899 • • • Howells : *• Their Silver Wedding Journey." 

1900 . . . Clemens: '"The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.'' 

Howells: *' Literary Friends and Acquaintance.*' 
Roosevelt: "The Strenuous Life." 
Warner died. 

1901 . . . Howells: '^ Heroines of Fiction." 

John Fiske died. 

1902 . . . Wister: *' The Virginian." 

Bret Harte and Stockton died. 

1903 . . . Howells: ''Letters Home." 

1904 . . . Howells : '' The Son of Royal Langbrith." 

1905 . . . Higginson : " Part of a Man's Life.' ■ 

Wharton : '' The House of Mirth." 

1906 . . . Rhodes: '* History of the United States *' (concluded). 

1907 . . . Butler: " True and False Democracy.*' 

Aldrich died. 

1908 . . . Stedmm and J. C. Harris died. 

1909 . . . Brownell : '• American Prose-Masters." 

Emerson : " Journals." 

Gilder and F. Marion Crawford died. 

1910 . . . Howells : " My Mark Twain." 

'•O. Henry" and S L. Clemens died. 

191 1 . . . Deland : " The Iron Woman." 

Wharton : '' Ethan Frome.*' 

1912 . . . Burroughs: '^ Time and Change." 

Paine : " Mark Twain." 

1913 . . . Roosevelt: '* An Autobiography." 

Lodge : " Early Memories." 



264 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

1914 . . . James: ^' Notes of a Son and Brother." 

Mahan died. 

1915 . . . Churchill: ^^ A Far Country." 

1916 . . . Howells : ^' Leathervvood God.'' 

Riley and Henry James died. 

1917 . . . Butler: '* World in Ferment.*" 

Garland : '' Son of the Middle Border." 
Paine: **Mark Twain's Letters." 



INDEX 



Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 244. 
"Marjorie Daw," 244. 
"Story of a Bad Boy," 244. 

Bancroft, George, 238. 
Bradstreet, Anne, 17. 
Brown, Charles Brockden, 228. 
Bryant, William CuUen, 69-80. 

boyhood of, 69, 70. 

his study of law, 70. 

''Thanatopsis," 71, 72. 

"Inscription for the Entrance to a 
Wood," 71. 

marriage of, 71. 

"The Yellow Violet," 72. 

journahstic career of, 74. 

"Letters of a Traveler," 75. 

"Letters from the East," 76. 

as public speaker, 76. 

"Thirty Poems," 77. 

translation of "Odyssey," 77. 

translation of "Iliad," 77. 

death of, 78. 

estimate of, 78, 79. 
Bunner, Henry Cuyler, 245. 

Clemens, Samuel L. ("Mark Twain"), 

215-226. 
boyhood of, 216. 
"The Jumping Frog," 217. 
visits to Europe, 217, 218, 222. 
"Innocents Abroad," 217. 
marriage of, 217. 
"Roughing It," 217. 
"The Gilded Age," 217. 
"Tom Sawyer," 217, 218. 
"A Tramp Abroad," 218. 
"Prince and Pauper," 218. 
"Huckleberry Finn," 218, 219. 
"Life on the Mississippi," 219. 
"A Connecticut Yankee at King 

Arthur's Court," 220. 



Clemens, Samuel L. — Continmd 

"Pudd'nhead Wilson," 220. 

"Joan of Arc," 220. 

"The Man that Corrupted Hadley- 
burg," 220. 

misfortunes of, 222. 

"Following the Equator," 222. 

death of, 223. 

estimate of, 224-226. 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 56-68. 

boyhood of, 57, 58. 

his year's cruise, 58. 

midshipman in na\'y, 58, 59. 

marriage of, 59. 

life at Mamaroneck, 59. 

"Precaution," 60. 

"The Spy," 62. 

"The Pioneers," 62. 

"The Last of the Mohicans," 63. 

"The Pathfinder," 63. 

"The Deerslayer," 63. 

"The Prairie," 63. 

" Leatherstocking Tales," 62, 63. 

"The Pilot," 64. 

"The Red Rover," 64. 

"The Two Admirals," 64. 

"The Wing-and-Wing," 65. 

"History of United States Navy," 
65. 

"The Wept of Wish- ton- Wish," 65. 

"The Bravo," 65. 

"The Headsman," 65. 

hostiUty against, 65. 

"Bread and Cheese Lunch," 65. 

death of, 66. 

estimate of, 66, 67. 
Crawford, F. Marion, 245. 
Curtis, George William, 241. 

Dana, Richard H., 242. 
Drake, Joseph Rodman, 240. 
"Culprit Fay," 240. 



265 



266 



INDEX 



Edwards, Jonathan, 18-20. 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 96-112. 

boyhood of, 97. 

education of, 97, 98. 

marriage of, 99. 

visits to Europe, 99, 106, 109. 

friendship with Carlyle, 99. 

lectures of, 99, 100, 109. 

"Nature," 100. 

"The American Scholar," 100. 

estimate of, loi, 102, iii. 

editor of the Dial, loi. 

"Essays," First and Second Series, loi. 

"Poems," 103. 

"Representative Men," 106. 

"English Traits," 107. 

"Conduct of Life," 109. 

"Natural History of the Intellect," 
no. 

"Letters and Social Aims," no. 

death of, no. 

Field, Eugene, 230-233. 

youth of, 230. 

visit to Europe, 231. 

marriage of, 231. 

journalistic career of, 231. 

"A Little Book of Western Verse," 
232. 

"Second Book of Verse," 232. 

estimate of, 232, 233. 

death of, 232. 
Fiske, John, 239. 
FrankUn, Benjamin, 21-39. 

boyhood of, 21-25. 

purchases Pennsylvania Gazette, 25. 

marriage of, 25. 

"Poor Richard's Almanack," 25-29. 

inventions of, 28. 

official positions of, 29. 

Commissioner to England, 30, 31. 

"Rules for Reducing a Great Empi . 
to a Small One," 31. 

member Second Continental Congress, 

American Minister to France, 31, 32. 
"Autobiography," 32, 37. 
death of, :i,2,. 
estimate of, 33-39. 
Fuller, Margaret, 243. 

Gilder, Richard Watson, 244. 



Halleck, Fitz-Grcene, 240, 241. 

"Marco Bozzaris," 241. 
Hamilton, Alexander, 206. 
Harris, Joel Chandler, 228, 229. 
Harte, Bret, 229. 

"The Luck of Roaring Camp," 229. 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1 13-126. 

boyhood of, 113, 114. 

education of, 114. 

"Twice-Told Talcs," 116. 

marriage of, 116. 

"Mosses from an Old Manse," 117. 

"The Scarlet Letter," 119. 

"The House of the Seven Gables," 119. 

"A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys," 
120. 

"Tanglewood Tales," 120. 

"The Blithedale Romance," 120. 

consul to Liverpool, 122. 

"The Marble Faun," 122. 

"Our Old Home," 124. 

death of, 124. 

estimate of, 125, 126. 
Henry, O. (Porter, Sydney), 245. 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 158-170. 

boyhood of, 158. 

education of, 159. 

"Old Ironsides," 159. 

his study of medicine, 160. 

visits to Europe, 160, 168. 

marriage of, 162. 

"The Autocrat of the Breakfast- 
Table," 163. 

"The Professor at the Breakfast- 
Table," 164. 

"Over the Teacups," 164, 169. 

"Pages from an Old Volume of Life," 
164. 

"Medical Essays," 164. 

"Elsie Venner," 165, 166. 

"The Guardian Angel," 165. 

"A Mortal Antipathy," 165, 166. 

"John Lothrop Motley," 166. 

"Ralph Waldo Emerson," 166. 

"Poems," 167, 168. 

"Our Hundred Days in Europe," 169. 

"Before the Curfew," 169. 

death of, 169. 

estimate of, 169, 170. 

Irving, Washington, 40-55. 
boyhood of, 40-42. 



INDEX 



267 



Irving, Washington — Continued 
his study of law, 42. 
visits to Europe, 42, 45, 50. 
"Salmagundi," 43. 
death of Matilda Hoffman, 44. 
''Knickerbocker's New York," 44, 45. 
"Sketch Book," 48-50. 
"Bracebridge Hall," 49, 50. 
"Tales of a Traveler," 49. 
"Columbus," 50, 51. 
"Companions of Columbus," 51. 
"Conquest of Granada," 51. 
"Alhambra," 51, 52. 
his home at Tarry town, 52, 53. 
Minister to Spain, 52. 
"Goldsmith," 53. 
"Mahomet," 53. 
"Wolfert's Roost," 53. 
"Life of Washington," 54. 
death of, 54. 
estimate of, 54, 55. 

Jackson, Helen Hunt, 243. 
James, Henry, 245. 
Jay, John, 206. 
Jefferson, Thomas, 205. 

author of Declaration of Independence, 
205. 

Kennedy, John Pendleton, 228. 

Lanier, Sidney, 242. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 210-214. 

education of, 210. 

as a lawyer, 211. 

letters of, 212. 

' ' First Inaugural Address, " 212. 

"Second Inaugural Address," 214. 

"Gettysburg Address," 214. 

estimate of, 212. 
London, Jack, 245. 
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 127-140. 

boyhood of, 128. 

education of, 129. 

visits to Europe, 129, 137. 

marriage of, 129, 132. 

"Outre-Mer," 129. 

professorship at Harvard, 130. 

"Hyperion," 130. 

"V^oices of the Night," 131. 

"Ballads," 131, 

"Poems on Slavery," 132. 



Longfellow, Henry W. — Continued 

"The Spanish Student," 132. 

"Belfry of Bruges," 132. 

"Evangehne," 132. 

"Kavanagh," 132. 

"The Seaside and th^ Fireside," 133. 

"The Song of Hiawatha," 134. 

"Courtship of Miles Standish," 134. 

translation of "Divine Comedy," 135. 

"Tales of a Wayside Inn," 137. 

"Christus, a Mystery," 137. 

"The Masque of Pandora," 137. 

"Judas Maccabaeus," 137. 

later poems, 138. 

death of, 138. 

estimate of, 139. 
Lowell, James Russell, 178-193. 

boyhood of, 178, 179. 

education of, 179, 180. 

marriage of, 181. 

abolitionist, 181, 182. 

"The Bigelow Papers," 183, 184, 187. 

"Fable for Critics," 183, 184. 

"Vision of Sir Launfal," 184. 

visit to Europe, 185. 

lectures on the EngHsh poets, 185. 

professorship at Harvard, 186. 

editor of The Atlantic, 186. 

"Fireside Travels," 186. 

"The Cathedral," 187. 

"Under the Willows," 187. 

"Among my Books," 187, 188. 

"My Study Windows," 187. 

estimate of, 188, 190, 192. 

"Three Memorial Poems," 189. 

Minister to Spain, 189. 

"Democracy," 189, 190. 

"Political Essays," 190. 

"Heartsease and Rue," 190. 

death of, 192. 

Madison, James, 206. 
Mahan, Alfred T., 239, 240. 
Mather, Cotton, 17, 18. 
Mather, Increase, 17. 
Morris, Gouverneur, 205. 
Motley, John Lothrop, 238, 239. 

Paine, Thomas, 205. 

"Common Sense," 205. 
Parkman, Francis, 194-203. 

boyhood of, 195. 



268 



INDEX 



Parkman, Francis — Continued 

education of, 195. 

life among the Indians, 196. 

''The Oregon Trail," 197. 

his ill health, 197-199. 

''The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 198. 

"Pioneers of France in the New 
World," 200. 

"The Jesuits in North America," 200. 

"La Salle and the Discovery of the 
Great West," 200. 

"Count Frgntenac and New France," 
200. 

"A Half Century of Conflict," 200. 

"Montcalm and W^olfe," 200. 

marriage of, 202. 

professorship at Harvard, 202. 

death of, 202. 

estimate of, 202. 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 81-95. 

boyhood and education of, 82-84. 

enlistment in army, 84. 

"Tamerlane and Other Poems," 85. 

"Poems," 85. 

"Manuscript Found in a Bottle," 85. 

editor, Southern Literary Messenger, 85. 

marriage of, 86. 

"Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," 
86. 

"Tales of the Grotesque and Ara- 
besque," 87. 

"Murders in the Rue Morgue," 90. 

"The Gold Bug," 90. 

life in New York, 90-92. 

"The Raven and Other Poems," 91. 

estimate of, 92, 94. 

"The Bells," 92. 

"Eureka," 93. 

death of, 94. 
Porter, Sydney ("O. Henry"), 245. 
Prescott, William Hickling, 239. 

Riley, James Whitcomb, 233-237. 

"The Old Swimmin' Hole," 235. 

"Pipes o' Pan at Zekesbury," 235. 

*'Rhymes of Childhood," 235. 

"Poems Here at Home," 235. 

lecture tour, 235. 

death of, 235. 

estimate of, 234-237. 
Ripley, George, 241. 
Rowson, Susanna H., 243. 



Simms, William Gilmore, 228. 
Smith, Captain John, 16. 
Smith, F. Hopkinson, 245. 
Sparks, Jared, 238. 
Stedman, E. C, 241, 242. 
Stockton, Frank R., 245. 
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 243, 244. 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin," 243, 244. 

Taylor, Bayard, 241. 

Thoreau, Henry David, 171-177. 

boyhood and education of, 172. 

life at Walden, 172. 

"A Week on the Concord and Merri- 
mac Rivers," 173. 

"Walden," 173, 174. 

death of, 175. 

estimate of, 175, 177. 

"Maine Woods," 175. 

"Cape Cod," 175. 
Timrod, Henry, 242. 
Twain, Mark {See Clemens, Samuel L.). 

Webster, Daniel, 207-210. 

official positions of, 207. 

orations of, 208, 209. 

"Reply to Hayne," 208, 210. 

estimate of, 209, 210. 
Whipple, E. P., 241. 
White, Richard Grant, 241. 
Whitman, Walt, 242. 
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 141-157. 

boyhood and education of, 141-145- 

journalistic career of, 145. 

work for antislavery movement, 146. 

"Legends of New England," 147. 

"Voices of Freedom," 147. 

life at Amesbury, 149. 

"Lays of My Home," 149. 

"Songs of Labor," 150. 

"Home Ballads," 150. 

"In War Time," 151. 

"Snow-Bound," 151. 

"Tent on the Beach," 151. 

"Among the Hills," 151- 

"Ballads of New England," 153. 

"JMabel Martin," 153. 

"The King's Missive," 153. 

"At Sundown," 153. 

death of, 153. 

estimate of, 153-156. 
WoolsoTi, Constance Fenimore, 243. 



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